Bay Area LifeTech Hosts Nano Precision Medical and European Startup Competition at Netherlands Consulate General

By Karen Ring, Ph.D.

This month’s Bay Area LifeTech (BALT) event, held at the Netherlands Consulate General, featured talks from Nano Precision Medical, RockHealth, and European health startups. The event was organized and hosted by BALT founder Luke Lightning Ph.D., the Netherlands Office of Science and Technology (NOST), and the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT ICT Labs). It was a record turnout with over 100 BALT members in attendance. 

Adam Mendelsohn Ph.D., co-founder and CEO of Nano Precision Medical (NPM), kicked off the event with a discussion on how NPM’s subdermal implant device can vastly improve consistent drug delivery to patients. Adam and his colleagues developed the idea in graduate school and their idea took off in 2008 when they entered and won the Berkeley business plan competition. Their implant device utilizes titanium oxide nanotubes with precisely sized pores that allow for constant rate delivery of drug molecules over long periods of time. The nanotubes can be tailored for specific drug molecules by altering the size of the drug-releasing pores. Diseases that would benefit from NPM’s technology include type II diabetes, lysosomal storage diseases, hemophilia, hepatitis C, multiple sclerosis, and many others. When asked about the current status of their product and company, Adam explained, “ We are currently in early-stage preclinical development.  We have proof-of-concept pharmacokinetic data demonstrating that our technology works, and we have recently begun applying the technology to a compound for type II diabetes. Our short-term goal is to develop proof-of-concept human efficacy data with an important application that could feasibly become a product, and our long-term goal is to apply the technology more broadly to the numerous therapeutic molecules for which long-term constant-rate delivery would benefit patients.” Keep your eyes open BALTers because this company will be one to watch for in the future!

Following Adam’s talk, Malay Ghandi spoke about how RockHealth, a nonprofit startup based in San Francisco, is attempting to transform health care by supporting digital health startups through their full service seed fund. RockHealth, founded in 2010, invests in early stage digital health companies and has already put 60 startup companies through its program, which includes benefits such as seed funding, mentors, office space, and operational support. Malay mentioned that applications are open for the next class of startups until the end of October.

The second half of the event was new to the BALT scene and featured pitches from European health IT startups supported by EIT ICT Labs. EIT ICT Labs is an innovation and education organization based in the Netherlands whose mission is to “drive European leadership in ICT innovation for economic growth and quality of life”. Earlier in the day, these startups participated in a boot camp where they were coached on how to give effective pitches to potential investors. After revising their original work, these startups tested their newly perfected pitches on the BALT crew.

In all, 11 European startups gave two minute pitches in a competition voted on by event attendees. While each startup gave a compelling case for their health product, Biocare Provider, Beddit, Monobonda, and Proxible, were the four that won the most votes from the crowd. Read below for brief descriptions of these startups.

Beddit is a Finnish company that strives to improve human health through sleep quality. Beddit is a thin film sensor placed under bed sheets that monitors sleep quality, heart rate, snoring, movement, and bedroom environment. Beddit sends information to your mobile device where an application generates data that details your sleep history and provides guidance on how to improve your sleep quality. Numerous sleep-monitoring devices exist, but they all require the user to wear sensors, which can be cumbersome. Beddit is barely detectable and allows for more accurate readings of sleep quality. 

BioCare Provider is an Italian startup that provides simple solutions to complex therapies. BioCare acknowledges that effective disease treatment can be complicated by factors such as difficulty to take medications, poor communication with doctors, health literacy and awareness, the list goes on. In response, BioCare generated a cloud- and mobile app based platform called Dr. Drin that connects patient medical history to doctors, pharmacists, and other providers, and supplies therapeutic management solutions. 

Comftech is an Italian startup whose motto is “we care with Comfortable Technology.” Comftech has designed clothes with built-in sensors that continuously monitor the wearer’s physiological parameters allowing for diagnosis, treatment, and even prevention of certain diseases such as cardiovascular and respiratory diseases. Initially focusing on preterm infants, Comftech designed the “Kiddie”, baby clothing with small biosensors that record the heart’s electrical activity. The company is expanding its product repertoire to include sensorized garments for kids, athletes, pregnant mothers, and the elderly.

Connected Care is a Netherlands based startup that provides a coordinated care platform for elderly patients, family caregivers, and professional organizations. Users can upload their daily activities and needs thus allowing for more efficient and less costly care from care providers. As an added benefit, Connected Care can step in when family caregivers need additional help by providing on-demand, professional support.

Cordian is a Dutch startup that is addressing the challenge of providing adequate healthcare for the world’s expanding aging population with its Sustainable Care platform. Cordian collaborates with aging care facilities to provide a better quality of life and more efficient care for patients using advance technological innovations such as the BedLeave monitoring system, which notifies nurses when a patient leaves his or her bed.

Mendor is a Finnish startup that provides a next generation blood glucose meter for diabetes management. Described as “quick and sleek”, this device allows users to test their blood glucose levels in less than 20 seconds in an all-in-one portable device the size of a smart phone. Results are uploaded to a cloud-based diabetes care platform called Mendor Balance, which allows doctors to access patient results thereby providing a more individualized form of care. 

Monobonda is a Dutch gaming company whose mission is to get individuals to play through interactive experiences. Each game conveys a specific message in a personal way. These messages have a common theme: promoting human happiness, health, and wellness. Examples include an iPad game for toddlers called “Nott Won’t Sleep” which promotes healthy sleeping habits, and a game called “Remembering” which was shown to improve the happiness of Alzheimer’s patients while they played the game. 

Ontoforce is a Belgian startup that develops semantic technology to collect and manage private and public biomedical data. Ontoforce aims to accelerate drug discovery by linking diverse arrays of data through an online, user-friendly search engine called disQover. Ontoforce’s technology allows pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, doctors, researchers, and even patients to save time, reduce costs, and ultimately, save human lives.

Proxible is a Dutch startup that offers proximity technology for businesses where relevant information can be sent directly to visitor’s smart devices via proximity sensors. This technology has the potential to revolutionize the way doctors and providers access patient information. Proxible has generated a bed sensor that connects to a doctor’s smart device and uploads a patient’s record at the touch of a button. This innovative technology can improve healthcare by avoiding misplacement or mixing up of patient information. 

RecoApp is a Finnish health and fitness mobile application that does not require an external monitoring device. RecoApp takes advantage of the latest sports and exercise science research to generate personalized workouts that minimize injury and recovery time and maximize health and fitness. The app comes with features that ensure that you are not over- or undertraining and diligent users can experience enhanced athletic performance, increased muscle mass, decreased body fat, and reduced stress levels.

Relaxbirth is a Finland-based company that gives women an active and empowering role when giving birth. The Relaxbirth method, which is an adjustable support system, maximizes the mother’s natural way of giving birth and allows the mother to relax during the first stage of labor in order to save energy for the second stage. The results are not only a more comfortable birthing process, but also an improvement in the overall wellbeing of the mother at childbirth. 

For more information on EIT ICT Labs and the European startup boot camp, read Natasha Chatlein’s blog on the NOST silicon valley website. Join BALT on Thursday December 5^th for another exciting event hosted at the Netherlands Consulate General. The topic for this Meetup will be Oncology and will feature talks from academics, clinicians, and startups.

Karen Ring is a Postdoctoral Scholar at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging. To Contact Karen, email at Ring.Karen@gmail.com.

Bay Area Startups: Bringing Digital Health to Your Fingertips by Karen Ring, PhD

Bay Area Startups: Bringing Digital Health to Your Fingertips

By Karen Ring, Ph.D.

Did you know that approximately 1 in 2 Americans live with at least one chronic illness? With our growing elderly population and skyrocketing healthcare costs, the US is eager to find ways to minimize spending and increase the efficiency and quality of patient care.

One of the opportunities currently being pursued is digital health. Digital health integrates patient health and wellness with digital technology in order to establish a more organized and communicative healthcare network. The industry is blowing up with 55 digital health exits either through IPO or acquisitions in the past year and more than $956 million raised from venture capital firms reported in 2011. The market is projected to hit $31.3 billion by 2017 and $60 billion in 2025.

To be honest, I was relatively unfamiliar with the concept of digital health technology, until I attended Bay Area LifeTech’s (BALT) digital health meetup featuring talks by three digital health startup companies: Practice Fusion, Better Doctor, and Mevoked. The event was organized by BALT founder Luke Lightning, Ph.D., and sponsored by DLA Piper and Robert W. Baird & Co.

Stephen Abreu, an associate at DLA Piper and the host of the event, commented, “It was a pleasure for DLA Piper to host the digital health networking event.  We recognize that the area of digital health is a growing field and holds much promise, with the potential to address some of the most challenging issues in healthcare.  We welcome the opportunity to support entrepreneurs in the space, and hope to leverage our deep expertise in areas such as corporate law, intellectual property transactions, and regulatory analysis to continue to do so.”

The talks were eye-opening and spoke to how technology can revolutionize healthcare in the next few decades. Below are descriptions of each of the presentations.

Sachin Kelkar has been at Practice Fusion (practicefusion.com) for six months in the role of corporate finance strategy. The company has tackled population health management by providing physicians and medical doctors with free electronic medical records that are contained within a single, cloud-based platform. This platform is useful for doctors as well as patients not only for digitizing patient medical history, but also for identifying new patients, emailing test results or diagnoses, booking appointments, filling prescriptions, and even identifying potential medical problems such as allergies or drug-drug interactions. Patients can also find new doctors who subscribe to Practice Fusion through a service called “Patient Fusion”. Practice Fusion generates revenue through advertisements and is the fastest growing online health platform in the US. Currently, 1 in 4 doctors choose their services. Sachin explains their client base, “Practice Fusion targets the ambulatory, or non-hospital based, physician community where north of 50% of doctors are still charting on paper. 80% of physicians practice outside of the hospital, but Practice Fusion’s reach is naturally moving upstream to larger practices, IPAs and community based hospitals.” It seems that the sky’s the limit for Practice Fusion with more than 100,000 doctors using their platform and their recent $70 Million Series D fundraising, which values the company at approximately $700 million..

Paul Whitaker has worked with BetterDoctor (betterdoctor.com) for nine months as the vice president of business development. BetterDoctor makes it easier for patients to find high quality doctors by doing the work for them. By using either their online website or downloading their mobile app, patients can look up local doctors that have been rated and meet the criteria of a “better doctor”. Signing up is simple. BetterDoctor asks you to supply background information such as where you live, your insurance provider, and what type of doctor you need, in order to match you with a doctor in a timely manner. Doctors who participate in this program in turn are rated based off a number of criteria including consumer rating services, state licensing board information, outcome data, education, and training data.  While BetterDoctor has focused its efforts initially on the Bay Area, it is also expanding across the US. Paul explains, “Most of the doctors in the US are already on our service. People from Paris Texas to New York and San Francisco can find local doctors using BetterDoctor. The rollout of markets is really more related to doctor participation. We want doctors to be engaged to ensure that they are well represented on BetterDoctor. This creates much higher value for patients and for doctors.” So don’t worry if you find yourself sick while you are out of town: finding a physician could be as simple as downloading BetterDoctor!

Arun Ravi is the CEO and founder of Mevoked (mevoked.com), a behavioral analysis platform that correlates online and mobile behavior to mental health wellness. Mental health is one of the biggest untreated problems plaguing US healthcare. The average time from diagnosis to actual treatment is 20 years. As Arun puts it, “Mental health needs technology and it hasn’t come to that yet.” Mevoked presents an opportunity to help with mental health wellness. Arun and his colleagues have teamed up with an advisory board of psychiatrists and psychologists to look at behavioral indicators of mental illness in young adults. Mevoked was designed to determine an individual’s state of mind based on how he or she uses technology such as a computer, smartphone, or iPad. Mevoked also provides a monitoring system for parents who can receive reports about their child’s activities online and more important identify any warning signs of potential worrisome online behavior. While Mevoked is currently focused on tracking mental illness, Arun’s plan is to eventually use this platform to track the onset of other debilitating and devastating diseases such as neurodegenerative disorders, eating disorders, and post traumatic stress disorder in war veterans. Mevoked will launch its consumer product at the end of September. Keep your eyes open because the first 100 users who sign up will receive a discount!  

The next BALT networking event featuring local start-ups will focus on Medical Devices and will be held on Thursday, October 3rd at the Netherlands Consulate General. Also, we have an exciting announcement: The BALT group recently surpassed a major milestone and welcomed its 1,000th member! Congratulations to Luke for putting together such a successful networking group!

Karen Ring is a postdoctoral scholar at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging. To contact Karen email at Ring.Karen@gmail.com.

Networking by the Bay by Karen Ring, PhD

Networking by the Bay: Bay Area LifeTech event brings academia and biotech together.

By Karen Ring, PhD

(Frank Bos PhD, Aniek Janssen PhD, Gaia Skibinski PhD, Luke Lightning PhD)

Bay Area LifeTech (BALT) held another successful networking event this past Thursday at the Netherlands Consulate General, Office of Science and Technology (NOST) in San Francisco. Founded by Luke Lightning, PhD, BALT hosts local meetup events that bring together members of biotech, pharmaceutical, and medical device industries, as well as academics, investors, executives, and clinicians, to foster an interactive, health sciences-based community. NOST, headed by Robert Thijssen, PhD, and Natasha Chatlein, strives to promote collaborations in the fields of energy, health science, and technology, between the US West Coast, Canada, and the Netherlands. When asked about working with BALT, Natasha said, “This is our third event with Luke and we at the NOST look forward to more opportunities for collaboration. We think of Bay Area LifeTech as a great platform to showcase topnotch research and innovations in the life sciences and biotech field, both here in Silicon Valley as well as in the Netherlands.”

Titled “Rocking Research by Bay Area Postdocs”, the event featured a meet-and-great happy hour sponsored by Cell Signaling Technology, Corning, and Medline. Over 50 BALT members showed up to enjoy dim sum and cocktails over stimulating conversation on hot topics such as stem cell clinical trials and the current financing of biotechnology. The happy hour was followed by three short presentations by local postdocs on cutting-edge research focusing on angiogenesis, Parkinson’s disease, and cancer therapy. Feedback on the event was very positive. Postdoc Mahru An, commenting about the experience, said, “This was my first BALT event and I was glad to find easy conversations with friendly people who were open to talk about the industry and their professional experience.” Likewise another postdoc, Olga Momcilovic, said, “The speakers were really good. This was a great opportunity to meet BALT colleagues, talk about science, and learn from a diverse group of professionals in a relaxed and friendly environment. Not to mention that food and drinks were awesome, too! I am definitively going to another event.”

Below is a brief description of each of the three postdoc presentations:

Frank Bos, recent PhD graduate from the Hubrecht Institute in Utrecht and current postdoc in Dr. Ann Zovein’s lab at the University of California San Francisco, kicked off the talks with his take on “True Blood Production”. Frank is passionate about the role of endothelial cells in the generation of blood cells and uses both mouse and zebra fish models to study angiogenesis and the development of the vasculature. More specifically, Frank wants to determine what genes and pathways are important for the development of what is termed the hemogenic (or blood producing) endothelium. Looking to the future, he will attempt to generate populations of definitive hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) (precursors to mature blood cells) from adult endothelial cells by a process called directed differentiation. He highlighted the importance of this research by pointing out that prior attempts to generate definitive HSCs from embryonic stem cells resulted in only primitive hematopoiesis, which is not sufficient to repopulate and sustain irradiated mice that lack their own bone marrow.

Gaia Skibinski, a PhD from London’s Institute of Neurology and now postdoc in Dr. Steve Finkbeiner’s lab at the Gladstone Institute of Neurological Disease, gave a talk on cellular models of Parkinson’s disease (PD). She is specifically interested in the LRRK2 mutation, which is responsible for about 10% of familial PD cases. Gaia uses both mouse and human stem cell models to determine the role that LRRK2 plays in PD pathogenesis. Her research is aided by powerful tools that were built from scratch in the Finkbeiner lab. Named Robo1 and Robo2, these high-throughput robotic microscopes can take consecutive images of specific neurons throughout their lifetime. Gaia was able to monitor dopaminergic neuron (the specific neuronal subtype affected in PD) cell death over time in healthy and LRRK2 patient neurons that were derived from human induced pluripotent stem cells. She found that increased levels of LRRK2 in human neurons put those neurons at higher risk of cell death compared to healthy neurons.

Lastly, Aniek Janssen, who received her PhD at the Netherlands Cancer Institute and now researches in the lab of Dr. Gary Karpen at Lawrence Berkeley National Labs, rounded of the evening with a discussion on potential anti-cancer therapies. Aniek studies genetic instability and DNA damage in cancer cells. When cancer cells divide through a process called mitosis, the segregation of chromosomes occurs abnormally, resulting in the loss or addition of chromosomes in cells. Chromosome missegregation is a major contributor to tumorigenesis and can lead to DNA damage at the sight of missegregation. Aniek believes that we can target this genetic instability, which occurs in about 80% of all solid tumors, by increasing instability, which would subsequently “tip the balance” and send cancer cells down the pathway of cell death.  Her take home message was that genetic instability, a hallmark of cancer cells, can be exploited for therapeutic purposes.

BALT and NOST will continue to host exciting events featuring the careers and accomplishments of various BALT members. If you are interested in attending a BALT happy hour, the next event will be on August 1st at Lucky Strike Lanes in San Francisco from 5:30-8:30 PM. Additionally NOST will be hosting a Medical Devices event sometime during the fall of 2013.

Karen Ring is a Postdoctoral Scholar in Dr. Lisa Ellerby’s lab at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging. To contact Karen, email kring@buckinstitute.org.