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MEDCITY Reports1August 2013

This report sponsored by

Monthly Startups Index

August 2013


Table of Contents

MAIN CONTACT INFORMATIONMedCity MediaP.O. Box 606246Cleveland, OH 44106Phone: (216) 453-2662General inquiries: [email protected]

From the Editor 3 12

Most Popular Startups This Month 42 5

Digital & Health IT 4

Startups In-Depth 5

Startup Activity 15

3 Pharma & Biotech 20

Startups In-Depth 21

Startup Activity 23

4 Medical Devices & Diagnostics 25

Startups In-Depth 26

Startup Activity 38

Readers on digital devices can click on the headings below to get directly to the page.


From the Editor

What’s the emotional appeal?

A lot of what we write about on MedCity News is technical: a new drug’s effectiveness in a clinical trial or the design of a new device. Plenty of people read these articles, but what people really like to read about are stories with a wow factor - both “Wow, how great!” and “Wow, how awful!”

Healthcare is a big business but it’s also about helping people. Anyone who taps into that part of this industry has a much higher chance of getting people to pay attention.

In working with the journalists at MedCity News, I tell them to look for the emotion-al appeal of everything they write about. Not in an exploitative way, as in, “Your life depends on buying this new, unproven treatment!” or “Only our hospital can cure your cancer!” The right way to approach emotional appeal is to focus on how this new thing will make healthcare easier to get or more affordable. What real problem does this brand new thing solve? No amount of jargon will grab a reader’s attention as well as answering those two questions in a simple, straightforward way.

I tell entrepreneurs the same thing when they ask for feedback on a pitch. Yes, num-bers are important but so is a more personal connection with the audience, whether you are talking with one person or a crowd of 50 people. Investors will listen if you can speak smartly about market share and competitors, but they will remember you if your pitch has an emotional appeal. I’ve watched a crowd start listening more closely to a pitch after an entrepreneur tells a joke or a story that illustrates what a new service or product does in the real world.

Some of this is just good public speaking skills, but this is even more important for healthcare entrepreneurs trying to sell complicated products. I once asked a busi-nessman working on a test to detect biomarkers for lung cancer how he was going to simplify the technology to make it understandable to the audience. His masterful hook was to bring a real live dog with him on stage - because the origins of his company’s product came from studying how dogs detect smells. His team won the pitch contest.

What has made you say “Wow!” recently?

Veronica Combs

Editor, MedCity News

Veronica Combs, Editor in ChiefMedCity Media


Digital & Health IT


Startups In-Depth: Digital & Health IT

DNA testing for geneaology finds a match in StartUp Health-GE program

By: Stephanie BaumAug 7, 2013

It’s only been a few months since StartUp Health and GE’s three-year entre-preneur program got under way, but that hasn’t stopped Arpeggi, one of the program’s 13 companies, from being acquired.

Arpeggi, a big data, genomic sequencing analysis business with a name inspired by the CSO’s fondness for Radiohead is the target for Gene by Gene — one of the pioneers of direct-to-consumer DNA testing forgeneology, ac-cording to a company statement. It covers a wide range of genetic tests from determining paternity to tracing customers’ origins and evaluating people for genetic disorders from inherited diseases. It is absorbing Arpeggi and includ-ing its management team. The financial details weren’t disclosed.

With Arpeggi’s set of data management and analysis tools, Gene by Gene says it can further reduce the cost and increase the speed of genetic testing. That would make its tests more accessible to a wider customer base.

Despite the acquisition, David Mittelman said in an email that the company will remain in the program.

“Both Startup Health and GE are still with us as investors and are therefore quite incentivized to help us further succeed,” he said. “GE’s real interest is in consumer health so the merger aligns us more closely with GE’s interests since at [Gene by Gene] we will be developing a lot of new consumer prod-ucts.”

Continued on next page

Company:Arpeggi

CEO:Nir Leibovich

Website:http://www.arpeggi.com/

Twitter:@Arpeggi_Inc


Earlier this year Arpeggi developed a Genome Com-parison and Analytic Testing platform, a free commu-nity-driven platform for evaluating the performance of next-generation sequencing data analysis methods.

Arpeggi’s team and technology platform will be incor-porated into Gene by Gene, according to a company statement. Its founders will join Gene By Gene’s man-agement team. Arpeggi’s Nir Leibovich became Chief Business Officer, Jason Wang is now Chief Technology Officer and David Mittelman is now the Chief Scientific Officer.

In response to emailed questions Wang said Arpeg-gi’s founders honed their skills in the gaming business where the data management requirements are much bigger than in genomics. The origins of its genomic analysis tools can be traced back to Mittelman’s lab at

Virginia Bioinformatics Institute.

“We are leveraging the latest distributed computing, cloud and database technologies as well as experience from our past startup MarketZero, which was sold to Zynga in 2011,” said Wang. “Our goal is to abstract away the technical details of sequencing, technology, and bioinformatics — making genomics easy for every-one.”

The profile of genetic testing is set to grow quite a bit. Earlier this week 23andMe announced the start of a TV ad campaign. The direct-to-consumer genetic testing market alone is projected to grow to $233.7 million by 2018. If you include the clinical side, the regulatory landscape, testing technology, reimbursement physician adoption, bioinformatics as well as consumer demand are driving growth.


Health-GE (Continued)



The cool, the gross and the puzzling of medical prac-tice all in one photo-sharing app for docs

By: Deanna PogorelcAug 15, 2013

Imagine opening your Instagram app and being greeted with photos of am-putated, infected human leg, or a diabetic foot ulcer.

What’s nauseating to the average person could be interesting or helpful to a clinician, said Joshua Landy, an ICU doctor who dreamed up an app called Figure 1.

On the crowdsourced photo-sharing app, doctors upload interesting cases and engage in discussion.

“Now that cellphone cameras are so good that you can take high-resolution images, people are documenting unique or puzzling or straight-out-of-the-textbook illnesses,” Landy said. “But usually, they’re shared one-on-one, and as soon as both of those people stop paying attention, those cases aren’t shared anymore. Those great educational assets are no longer available.”

While he was at Stanford last summer doing research on how clinicians use their smart phones, Landy decided he wanted to create a place for clinicians to preserve and share those photos in a way that also protected patient privacy.

His first step was spending a few months consulting with two healthcare law firms to ensure that the app respected healthcare privacy laws. The app takes extra precautions beyond what’s necessary to do that, he said. For


Company:Figure 1

Co-Founder:Joshua Landy

Website:http://figure1.com/

Twitter:@Figure1app


example, if someone uploads a photo with a face in it, a built-in algorithm detects that and blocks it out. After uploading, the user is also prompted to use a paint tool to block out any text, tattoos or distinctive birthmarks in the photo before submitting it. Then, all images are reviewed by Figure 1 before they’re made public.

Users can also annotate their images by placing ar-rows, or can choose to share them privately with certain users. If photos are shared publicly, once they’ve been approved they appear in a stream on the main screen of the app. Each is accompanied by the username of the person who uploaded it, a caption, a star button to save the image to the user’s favorites, a flag button that removes the image from the public feed if someone identifies a privacy violation, and a comment box.

To give you an idea of the kinds of conversations taking

place, one recent post includes a photo of pink bumps on an arm with the caption, “Came up suddenly on a 7yo – thoughts? Impetigo? No pain or itch.” One person responded, “I’d take him in it could be a lot of different things from burn to infection that can spread.”

Launched just three months ago, the iPhone app al-ready has “tens of thousands of users,” according to Landy, and has scored good ratings so far. Android and web versions of the app are planned, and Landy is cur-rently raising money to move forward with them.

He attributes the speedy adoption of the app as simply doctors being doctors. “In medicine there tends to be a culture of sharing interesting findings with each other,” he said. “After you spend 10 to 12 years training, learn-ing and sharing new findings becomes second-nature to the way you practice.”


Photo-sharing app (Continued)



Power to the developers! An open body sensor platform is on the way


One man’s heart sensor could be another man’s fitness tracker. The possibil-ities are many when it comes to the Angel Sensor, a wearable device whose developers have coined it “the first open sensor for health and fitness.”

It’s still in the works, but the vision is for the device to be a wristband that measures pulse, blood oxygen saturation, skin temperature and acceleration. It would deliver that data to a Bluetooth-enabled device.

From there, developers would build software applications for the device. Is-rael-based Seraphim Sense, the company developing Angel, plans to release its SDK, drivers and app templates as open source.

There are advantages and disadvantages to that model, admitted co-founder Eugene Jorov. “On one side, it makes it more difficult to sell, because exactly what does it do?” he said. “On the other hand, we think that the market is ripe for this kind of technology. One company cannot come up with every-thing.”

That’s a valid point. Look at the handful of companies like FitBit and Jawbone that have raised millions of dollars and probably used a good portion of it to develop hardware, which at its core seems to be similar across the board of fitness trackers.

The Angel devices leaves out vitals like blood pressure that could be useful


Company:Angel

Founder:Eugene Jorov

Website:http://www.angelsensor.com/

Twitter:@AngelSensor


for more sophisticated medical use, but Jorov said addi-tional features could come later. “(The market is) still in the low-hanging fruit stage,” he said. “We’ve talked to sports doctors, cardiologists and pediatricians to learn what they want, and combined that with our intuition as developers.”

Jorov, a software engineer whose resume includes time at Sun Microsystems before it was acquired by Oracle, developed the device with engineer Amir Shlomovich.

Since the whole making-sense-of-the-data component is really important for a consumer-oriented device, a lot of Angel’s value will come from independent developers.

Jorov said he’s already getting emails and phone calls from some of them, and a crowdfunding campaign set to launch in a few weeks should help get the word out even more. If history repeats itself, that could very well be the case.

Jorov said he hopes the first devices will ship in the spring of 2014.

In the meantime, he isn’t too worried about all of the competition — even Apple’s rumored entrance into the space. “I think this market is big enough for everybody right now.”


Open body sensor (Continued)



3 years & a $91M exit later, a startup founder reacquires his patient portal business

By: Deanna Pogorelc Aug 26, 2013

In 2010, entrepreneur Steve Malik achieved the pinnacle of entrepreneurial success when he sold his patient portal company, Medfusion, to Intuit Inc. for $91 million.

Now, three years later, he’s buying it back.

Malik said he sees abundant opportunities in the patient portal market as Meaningful Use stage 3 lingers. Up to this point, engaging patients with portals has been a struggle for providers — even at places like Mayo Clinic. Although rules for Meaningful Use stage 3 have been delayed until next year, draft guidelines proposed earlier this year required that 10 percent of patients would have to communicate with their provider through a portal.

And he thinks Medfusion, now called Intuit Health, has a big advantage in making that happen. “Intuit has invested tremendous amounts of dollars in the long-term potential of the business, particularly in scalability aspects of the solution that as a small company I could not have put the R&D into,” he said.

Malik remained general manager of the Cary, North Carolina-based compa-ny for two years after its acquisition, and has been vetting deals with other health IT companies as a venture capitalist over the past several months. That’s where he really saw the company’s advantage in the market, he said.


Company:Intuit Health

Founder & CEO:Steve Malik

Website:http://healthcare.intuit.com/

Twitter:@IntuitHealth


For example, in the three years that the company has been owned by Intuit, the number of physicians using it has essentially tripled in size, he said. Mobile acces-sibility was also never a consideration when he sold the company. But Intuit, which makes Quicken and TurboTax software, applied its skills in mobile utilization to create a mobile app, which sees a rate of patient utilization about six times higher than the web version, he said.

In addition, Intuit had been able to apply some of its expertise in automation to Intuit Health’s billing, sched-uling and patient engagement solutions. “The single big-gest factor holding patients up today is that they have to enter data and no one wants to do that,” Malik said. “We’re making it easier for patients to not have to fill it in and creating more of a ‘do-it-for-me’ environment.”

Ultimately, though, Intuit decided its healthcare software development business didn’t align with the growth mod-el of the company overall and would be better served by a company focused on the healthcare industry. In July,

it announced it planned to sell Intuit Health Group. The terms of the deal with Malik were not disclosed.

“I envision a world where providers, after your visit, say ‘here’s an app for you,’” Malik said. An important part of that vision is that data from the patient would also flow back into the EHR. That’s a long way from where it was when he started the company 15 years ago, when the term “patient portal” wasn’t even being used yet. Now, the average Intuit Health customer has about 18 percent of its patients using the portal, he said.

Future plans for growth include making a move into the community health space. “There’s still a lot of move-ment and opportunity and we’re excited about those growth potentials,” he said. “There are a lot of tethered portals today that work with one EHR vendor, but as you look at consolidation of practices and hospitals, most community systems have multiple IT environments. To be the agnostic leader and work with virtually any HIT is a huge advantage and you’ll see us moving more into that community practice space.”


Patient portal (Continued)



Could a video game boost communication, deci-sion-making skills in kids with autism?


That gray feline avatar — that’s Shadow Cat. He’s a virtual comic book char-acter that an early-stage Cleveland startup is turning into a tool to improve cognitive training, performance data collection and research for autism spec-trum disorders.

Tamar Medina and a pair of co-founders started J-LYNN Entertainment in 2011 to commercialize what they call video game comic books. Like a choose-your-own-adventure book, the idea of the game is that the user controls a character in a video game that’s structured in frames, like a comic book. The player guides the character through a series of tasks and deci-sions, where each outcome or decision changes the next step of the game, and kids collect achievement points along the way.

Originally, the idea was to create the games as an educational and enter-tainment product. But when Medina and his partners began attending comic book conventions to test their audience, they were approached by parents and teachers who mentioned that the video game comics would be great for children with autism and ADHD.

Autism spectrum disorders are characterized by communication and so-cial-interaction difficulties, so the interactive nature of the game would help kids develop social and decision-making skills, they said. “You can tell what’s going on in the comic without actually reading it, so it allows kids to associ-


Company:J-LYNN Entertainment

Founders:Jamie MedinaMark PavlikTamar Medina

Website:http://www.j-lynnentertainment.com

Twitter:@JLYNNENTERTAINM


ate words with pictures and actions,” Medina explained.

The team took the idea back to Cleveland, where Medi-na said not many people are investing in entertainment or media, and began exploring the idea of a product more geared toward the health market — a more favor-able market among local investors. Simultaneously, they heard about an NIH grant that fit almost exactly with the new idea.

Researchers have actually been studying the potential of computer-based programs as an intervention for children with special needs for decades, and sites like Whiz Kid Games, Aven’s Corner and FaceSay host free computer games designed for them. That, however, comes against a backdrop of research suggesting that children with an autism spectrum disorder are more like-ly to become addicted to games than children without disabilities.

So Medina began to send his pitch for comic book video games to autism researchers across the coun-try. Over the course of a few months, he recruited an advisory board that includes Dr. Thomas Frazier, director of the Center for Autism at Cleveland Clinic; Howard Shane at Boston Children’s Hospital; Kevin Kearns at SUNY Fredonia and Kate Vanderplough, founder of Autism Services for Kids in Cleveland. They are each lending their expertise to various components of the game, including game mechanics, reading comprehen-

sion, social skills and visual communications.

Medina imagines the game eventually being used not only as a way to entertain and teach kids but as a way for parents and therapists to monitor kids’ conditions. Developers are building out a back-end data compo-nent for parents and therapists to track a child’s perfor-mance. “If there’s one panel he spends four minutes on instead of 30 seconds on, they might be able to deduce certain things based on whether it was a reading com-prehension panel, or a complicated subject matter or whether certain images triggered an emotional reac-tion,” Medina said.

To get the product into the hands of the right people, and to get them to pay for it, Medina said the team is leaning toward targeting both consumers and clinics with a prescription-based model, where providers would subscribe to a premium product to manage the data component of it.

“Since we’re putting a new approach to software, we need scientific data and testing,” Medina said. For now, the team is trying to get that through grants. Once early testing is complete, they’ll look for investors.

“The great thing about this is it could be expanded beyond autism,” Medina said. “I’m starting to believe that the product is better for autism than for the original entertainment we made it for, but it’s also scalable in entertainment.”

Startup Activity: Digital & Health IT

Video games and autism (Continued)


Doximity adds secure digital fax line service so docs aren’t tethered to old tech – Aug 1, 2013

Doximity, a company that is often described as the “Facebook for doctors,” has launched a digital fax line for phy-sicians. Doxomity’s fax line is designed so a physician who receives a fax, and is notified at home or at the grocery store, won’t have to race to the hospital to pick it up.

http://bit.ly/13z6hSv


Health IT solution to help mental health providers monitor patient outcomes raising $500K – Aug 1, 2013

A health IT company commercializing technology for mental health professionals developed at University of Wash-ington appears to be raising a $500,000 series A, according to a recently filed U.S. Securities and Exchange Com-mission document.

http://bit.ly/16J9MrK

Maxwell Health adds to employer wellness program with $2M series A round – Aug 5, 2013

Maxwell Health, part of a growing group of companies offering concierge healthcare services to help employers con-trol costs, has raised $2 million in a series A round, according to a company statement.

http://bit.ly/13z6hSv

The doctor’s orders go digital and interactive – Aug 6, 2013

Health IT company Wellbe took inspiration from the ubiquitous GPS in designing a tool to help patients follow their treatments. The Patient Guidance System has checklists and forms, email reminders, educational materials, videos and decision support for patients.

http://bit.ly/13DcoJh

Pager hate meets BYOD: MD entrepreneur launches smartphone messaging platform for care teams – Aug 7, 2013

Dr. Divya Dhar wants you to know she hates the pager she was given when she became a physician. A lot. They’re unwieldy, time consuming, and don’t have the organizing abilities that SMS technology has.

http://bit.ly/1bdmVfQ


Kinsights launches digital health record, community forum for parents – Aug 7, 2013

A company called Kinsights this week launched its cloud-based digital health record and community forum, specif-ically for parents. On the site, parents can securely store and upload information about their child’s drug allergies, previous surgeries, and emergency contact information, symptoms, and more.

http://bit.ly/176ywKP


Max Levchin’s pregnancy app, Glow, hits the app store as it announces $6M funding round – Aug 8, 2013

The most-hyped get-pregnant-now app since teenage hormones announced a $6 million funding round on the same day as it launched. Glow is PayPal co-founder Max Levchin’s new app designed to help couples get pregnant.

http://bit.ly/148FRq1

MyFitnessPal raises $18M in first round of funding – Aug 12, 2013

MyFitnessPal, a company that offers a popular app to help people lose weight, has raised $18 million in a first round of funding. It boasts more than 40 million registered users, and shows no sign of slowing down.

http://bit.ly/1cv1VW0

A med school study app taps pop culture to reinforce learning – Aug 12, 2013

A couple of entrepreneurs who want to improve the way medical school students retain information beyond prepping for the next exam have developed a mobile app and web platform. Its app uses pop culture factoids and video to help explain the right (and wrong) answers as part of its approach to learning.

http://bit.ly/14FQd5d

Change Healthcare nabs $15M to deliver personalized price transparency to consumers – Aug 13, 2013

Change Healthcare markets two platforms. The Transparency Messenger compiles health plan and claims data to devise algorithms that determine the cost of a service. Then it uses health plan holders’ or employees’ demographic information and personal preferences for care to look for savings on their behalf.

http://bit.ly/1cKTEML


Fitbit workout band snags $43M – Aug 13, 2013

Fitbit, the fitness wristband that collects data about your exercise activities, received $43 million in funding today, according to an SEC filing. Fitbit does this by collecting information about how many calories you burn, how many steps you take, how far you go, and what your sleep patterns look like.

http://bit.ly/1eHwxPL


From personal finance to healthcare: NerdWallet launches hospital comparison tool– Aug 14, 2013

NerdWallet is best-known for its credit card comparison and personal finance website. The company is now moving in a new direction: healthcare.

http://bit.ly/1cBKDXl

A health IT system for emergency service teams adds California EMS group – Aug 14, 2013

In the shift to electronic medical records, many people forget that emergency service teams rely on paper-based records. Beyond Lucid Technologies wants to change that and has been rolling out software to help EMS groups convert from paper-based documents.

http://bit.ly/17pfRdm

COPD smartphone app seeks to improve patient engagement to reduce readmissions – Aug 15, 2013

Part digital health and part telemedicine, the SmartScope app is designed to help people with COPD manage their illness and stay out of the hospital.

http://bit.ly/1cHkkz0

More investors jump on board for CareCloud with $9M in funding

– Aug 15, 2013

CareCloud just added $9 million in venture funding to its enormous second round, making the startup $30 million richer in a matter of months. CareCloud develops technology for hospitals and health clinics, making it easier for physicians to collaborate with each other and access sensitive patient records in the cloud via devices like smart-phones and iPads.

http://bit.ly/1dbJNyq


Mana Health wins contract to design patient portal for New Yorkers – Aug 15, 2013

Portal users will have online access to their personal healthcare data, including lab results, lists of medications, radiology reports, and information about procedures and medical conditions from their providers, according to the statement. Patients will also be able to decide who can access their data, such as their doctors or family members.http://bit.ly/1a7XgYa


InteraXon snags $6M to further develop Muse ‘brain-sensing’ headband – Aug 16, 2013

The Muse has six sensors that replace a traditional head-covering EEG machine in a single slim, attractive head-band. “Muse is the brain-sensing headband that allows you to track your cognitive and emotional activity,” said CEO Ariel Garten.

http://bit.ly/14GLVq6

Blackboard Inc. co-founder’s specialty EMR company lands $14M to take on new markets – Aug 20, 2013

A fast-growing health IT company has scored a $14 million investment to bring its tailored, touch-based electronic medical record products to gastroenterologists, ear, nose and throat specialists, and rheumatologists.

http://bit.ly/14XENww

Entrepreneur’s digital autopsy facilities will replace the scalpel with the scanner – Aug 21, 2013

Malaysian entrepreneur Matt Chandran wants to update post-mortems by replacing the scalpel with a scanner and the autopsy slab with a touchscreen computer. He believes his so-called digital autopsy could largely displace the centuries-old traditional knife-bound one, speeding up investigations, reducing the stress on grieving families and placating religious sensibilities.

http://bit.ly/14jLSVK

Symptom tracker app for patients with rare bone marrow diseases aims to improve out-comes – Aug 22, 2013

A nonprofit foundation and a behavior change app producer 2morrow have collaborated on an app to help patients record their reaction to therapies and to improve outcomes in bone marrow failure treatment.

http://bit.ly/14nXozj


Wearable tech for baby: Smart sock monitors vitals, sends data to smartphone or comput-er – Aug 26, 2013

Owlet Baby Care is launching a smart sock that gives you information on your child’s heart rate, blood oxygenation levels, sleep quality, skin temperature, and sleep position. That last one is particularly critical, as doctors have said that sleeping face-down is likely a contributing factor in SIDS, sudden infant death syndrome.

http://bit.ly/17ZqaFc


In a popularity contest of physician-only social networks, Doximity pulls ahead with 200K users – Aug 27 2013

Doximity is a social platform that physicians can run on their smartphones, tablets or computers to connect with other physicians and specialists to securely send faxes, text messages, emails and images from one inbox.

http://bit.ly/1cecaKW

For hospital patients with limited English, Starling helps bridge the communication gap – Aug 27, 2013

Bill Tan arrived in America when he was 15 years old. He knew just 500 words of English, but this was 500 more than his family members. The experience inspired him to found Transcendent Endeavors, a company whose core mission is to use technology to break down communication barriers.

http://bit.ly/16KVIMz

OrganJet helps identify where wait times for kidney transplants are shortest, offers con-cierge services - Aug 28, 2013

By entrepreneur and Carnegie-Mellon University professor Sridhar Tayur’s reckoning, as many as 2,500 kidneys are wasted each year. Tayur’s website, OrganJet, lets users enter their zip code to determine other transplant centers with shorter wait times that are in closest proximity to them. It also provides private jet service to help get customers to their surgeries when kidneys become available.

http://bit.ly/17ihAVD

Put down the notebook. Labguru is trying to help PIs run research labs in the digital age - Aug 29, 2013

Jonathon Gross formed a company called BioData to commercialize that solution, Labguru. It’s cloud-based project management software aimed at keeping research plans and results more organized, making inventory easier to track and avoiding clunky handoffs of projects, which often results in information being lost or under-communicated.

http://bit.ly/17m9OZ9


Pharma & Biotech


Startups In-Depth: Pharma & Biotech

Pharma company developing Alzheimer’s pill that tar-gets link between blood sugar and brain health


A handful of high-profile Alzheimer’s disease drugs have failed in late-stage clinical trials in the last year — at least two of them based on the hypothesis that buildup of amyloid plaques in the brain give rise to neurodegeneration. Startup T3D Therapeutics Inc. thinks that warrants a different approach to a disease-altering therapeutic.

“Alzheimer’s disease involves multiple abnormalities, yet the pharmaceutical industry has placed heavy bets on developing treatments for just one abnor-mality,” said founder and CEO John Didsbury.

T3D claims it’s developing a drug with the potential to address several disease pathologies, including beta-amyloid plaque issues, inflammation, neuronal cell loss, neurotransmitter deficits, insulin deficiency and tau neu-rofibrillary tangles. And it would come in the form of a once-a-day pill for people with mild to moderate Alzheimer’s.

The Durham, North Carolina company licensed its technology from special-ty pharmaceutical company DARA BioSciences, where Didsbury formerly served as president and chief operating officer. DARA had developed the drug candidate, now called T3D-959, through phase 1 clinical trials as a treatment for diabetes and dyslipidemia. Thus, Didsbury said a key piece of T3D’s approach to altering the course of Alzheimer’s is insulin regulation.

Researchers have been studying a link between insulin dysregulation and


Company: T3D Therapeutics Inc.

President & CEO:John Didsbury

Website:http://www.t3dtherapeutics.com/


Alzheimer’s for almost a decade. T3D sees insulin deficiency as a trigger for the abnormalities that lead to neurodegeneration.

“Clinical symptoms never occur without sugar metab-olism decreases in the brain, which results from neu-rons becoming resistant to insulin,” he said. “Without the ability to use insulin to access sugar as an energy source, neurons die. T3D-959 acts as a powerful insulin sensitizer.”

Didsbury said the company just closed an oversub-scribed seed round this summer, which U.S. Securities Exchange and Commission filings indicate targeted $550,000, and just opened a series A round. “We will

be using those funds to do preclinical trials and a pilot clinical trial in Alzheimer’s disease,” he said.

For his part, Didsbury has assembled a supporting cast of science and pharmaceutical business veterans, and an advisory board that includes a key developer of Alz-heimer’s drug Aricept and the chief of neurology at Duke University Medical Center. The CEO has served in the C-suites of several pharma companies over the last two decades, including NovaTarg and GlaxoSmithKline.

“It has been a personal mission of mine for the last 25 years in the pharmaceutical industry to identify and develop a breakthrough medicine,” Didsbury said. “This is the culmination of that search.”

Startups In-Depth: Pharma & Biotech

Alzheimer’s pill (Continued)


AbbVie, angel investors restock nanomedicine leader Chad Mirkin’s pharma venture – Aug 5, 2013

For a Northwestern University biopharmaceutical spinoff, a second tranche of series B funding will push along pre-clinical development of gene-regulating therapies for multiple diseases.

http://bit.ly/13fciEd

Startup Activity: Pharma & Biotech

With $46M in tow, accelerator/investor BioMotiv puts to work a new model for drug devel-opment – Aug 5, 2013

Nearly halfway to its goal of raising $100 million, an intriguing venture that’s part drug development accelerator and part early-stage investor has begun picking promising projects it hopes will someday become drugs that fill a market need.

http://bit.ly/18ZcvzJ

Former Unigene management launches oral drug delivery business – Aug 6, 2013

Enteris Biopharma will use its oral drug delivery platform to help drug developers increase the solubility and absorp-tion of peptides and small molecule drugs in the digestive tract and to reduce variability and food effects.

http://bit.ly/17kmdNb

Canadian province puts $5M to work toward better cancer vaccines via Immunovaccine – Aug 12, 2013

The Province of Nova Scotia is lending $5 million to clinical-stage biotech Immunovaccine, which is developing an adjuvant platform that could make cancer vaccines more effective more quickly.

http://bit.ly/1ctSZjO

New non-invasive test for prostate cancer may identify severity of tumor also – Aug 13, 2013

Exosome Diagnostic, Inc., has developed a revolutionary non-invasive approach to molecular diagnostic testing that is gaining popularity, especially in the field of prostate cancer detection and prognosis.

http://bit.ly/17m0FO0


Biotech developing lower back pain remedy raises $6M – Aug 21, 2013

The serial entrepreneur who founded and led pediatric drug developer NextWave Pharmaceuticals that Pfizer ac-quired last year is now part of a management team interested in developing a treatment for lower back pain.

http://bit.ly/183haO1

Startup Activity: Pharma & Biotech

Entrepreneur’s drug database brings healthcare big data to the ordinary person – Aug 22, 2013

The healthcare industry has created more than 50 petabytes of data, but much of it never reaches the people who could benefit most from it. Former healthcare consultant Johnson Chen wanted to find a way to bring all of the use-ful, publicly available data from clinical drug trials to consumers who are taking those medications.

http://bit.ly/1bWrOu7

Smart pill bottle developers ink deal with wireless network provider KORE – Aug 27, 2013

People who decline or forget to take their medication for a variety of reasons generate roughly $100 billion in health-care costs each year, according to a recent article in JAMA. The goal behind AdhereTech’s pill bottle is to whittle that figure down and get at the root reasons why patients aren’t taking their medication.

http://bit.ly/15tFOKa


Medical Devices

& Diagnostics


Startups In-Depth: Medical Devices & Diagnostics

Boston-based company gets FDA clearance for non-invasive monitor aimed to help trauma-care clinicians treat patients in shock

By: Lindsey Alexander Aug 2, 2013

Reflectance Medical, Inc. has received FDA 510(k) clearance for a noninva-sive device that could help clinicians determine whether a patient is in shock or pre-shock or has tissue acidosis in real time at the point of injury or care. It’s the only noninvasive pHm monitoring device, and aims to save providers money by reducing ICU admissions and the length of ICU stays by decreas-ing the number of hospital-acquired infections.

Originally thought up as a response to a military solicitation to help medics treat injuries on the battlefield, the battery-powered Multi-Parameter Mobile CareGuide 3100 monitors muscle oxygen saturation and pH, which normally must be measured through blood tests. Because sticks or catheters are nor-mally required to measure pH, this noninvasive device could limit the number of hospital-acquired infections, thus reducing the length of ICU stays.

“If you identify someone before they actually go into shock, we can prevent complications that would keep them from staying in the hospital for a long time,” founder and CEO Babs Soller said.

With these measurements, the device can also offer information about whether a patient in shock’s muscles are acidic, or have acidosis, allowing clinicians to respond and treat with realtime feedback.


Company:Reflectance Medical, Inc.

President & CEO:Babs Soller

Website:http://www.reflectancemedical.com


“Right now what happens is in a trauma situation the EMT will pick up somebody, they get to the emergency department, and they’ll be treated as rapidly as possi-ble,” Soller said, “but really the first 10, 15, 20 minutes are really important. . . .They could start and optimize treatment earlier.”

The device works by throwing near-infrared light onto a patient’s skin, then measuring how much of that light is reflected and how much is absorbed. That measure-ment reads how much hemoglobin is oxygenated and applies an algorithm to chart pH levels and muscle-ox-ygen saturation ratios. The data then appears on a monitor, sold by the company’s partners–ZOLL Medical and Sotera Wireless.

This sensor is cleared to account and adjust for different

patients’ varying skin colors and thicknesses of fat–also unique.

Reflectance sells the device to its partners, who then sell this product directly to hospitals, ambulance ser-vices and the military.

Though the device is currently aimed at trauma and crit-ical care markets, Soller said the technology could also prove useful in chronic care, and Reflectance is work-ing in that direction, too. The company has developed an Android app that, with the device, could work as a remote patient monitoring system in the future.

If so, it would be unique in that it would provide more than “crude measurements,” Soller said. The goal of all these products: to keep patients out of the ER and clini-cians equipped with more “realtime decision support.”


Non-invasive monitor (Continued)



A one-minute test that could uncover malaria


When Brian Grimberg and a team at Case Western Reserve University began working on their Rapid Assessment of Malaria (RAM) device nearly four years ago, it was the size of a kitchen table. Today, the functional prototype is a handheld device that the team thinks can diagnose the tropical disease more quickly, simply and affordably.

Like the rapid stick tests sometimes used to diagnose malaria today, the device is an antibody-based test that requires a single drop of blood collect-ed from a person. But instead of taking 15 to 30 minutes to deliver results, the reusable, battery-operated device takes less than a minute. It scans the sample for a magnetic substance that malaria parasites release when digest-ing red blood cells and then delivers a positive or negative result on an LCD screen, according to John Lewandowski, CEO of Disease Diagnostic Group and a recent graduate of Case’s engineering management master’s program.

Grimberg, an assistant professor of international health, infectious disease and immunology at Case, started the work in his lab and called on the ex-pertise of the Department of Biomedical Engineering to turn it into a portable device. When Disease Diagnostic Group was officially formed last summer, he became chief medical officer.

The company has just secured a two-year technology transfer option from Case and $250,000 from the Coulter Translational Partnership. With those two pieces in place, it’s ready to take its working prototype to Peru this fall


Company:Disease Diagnostic Group

Founder:John Lewandowski

Website:http://istart.org/startup-idea/social-entrepreneurship/dis-ease-diagnostic-group/12120


for field studies. If it demonstrates accuracy and reliabil-ity there, Lewandowski said the company will pursue World Health Organization approval.

Grimberg said that because most malaria is treatable, a quicker, cheaper diagnostic test could save hundreds of thousands of lives a year. “The real advantage is that we can take it to the patients,” he said. “We can go into villages and screen people — even people who don’t feel sick but could carry the parasite. That’s another big advantage.”

Since it’s most prevalent in tropical areas, the malaria problem may seem to be a world away. But it’s actually one of the top causes of hospitalization among Amer-ican troops, diplomats, missionaries and aid workers, too.

Current antibody-based stick tests also can cost as

much as $35 per test. When you consider that almost half of the world’s population is at risk for malaria and there are some 219 million new cases a year, that’s a huge cost and time burden. Others still use plate microscopy tests, which require refrigeration, a micro-scope and trained personnel.

That’s why there’s been such a push for innovation in the field of malaria. Vaccines and new drug treatments are under development, and other companies like F-Cubed and Amplino are working on similar rapid tests.

Grimberg said the team has already seen a lot of inter-est from groups like the U.S. Army and Doctors Without Borders as they’ve presented at conferences. Lewand-owski said they will do some re-engineering based on user feedback after the field tests and then should have beta customers lined up for the fall of 2014 to do more testing.


One-minute test for Malaria (Continued)



A life-saving heart device with a check-engine light


Years of financial and safety woes in the implantable cardioverter defibrillator market haven’t scared off this early-stage medical device startup.

Asclepius Innovative Solutions (AIS Inc. for short) has retained its determina-tion to bring some peace of mind to people with ICDs by making it easier for doctors to keep tabs on how the life-saving devices are working.

When former U.S. Army flight engineer Carlos Ortiz went back to college to get a degree in biomedical engineering at the University of Memphis in 2010, he found himself working on a group project that tasked students with designing an improvement to an existing medical device. Ortiz drew on the experience of his grandfather, who had died of heart failure.

“The way the doctors explained it was that he didn’t die because of a con-dition or an incident, he died because of the time it took him to get to the hospital,” he said.

Ortiz wanted to design a better implantable cardioverter defibrillator that would make it easier for physicians to see what’s happening with the devices, which monitor the heart rhythms of patients with life-threatening arrhythmias and deliver electrical pulses when they detect irregular patterns.

His team, which included AIS co-founder Marsalas Whitaker, talked to two dozen cardiologists and electrophysicists in the Memphis area. Against a backdrop of troubling reports of malfunctioning leads, they communicated


Company:Asclepius Innovative Solutions

CEO & Founder:Carlos Ortiz

Website:http://aisdevices.com/

Twitter:@AIS_devices


demand for a leadless ICD with a better way for physi-cians to manage data coming from it. So his team got to work creating the device, which it now calls Guardian.

Designed with pediatric patients in mind, it’s as min-imally invasive as possible to accommodate growth and eliminate the need for risky lead placement and extraction procedures, Ortiz said. Instead, it uses two shock plates that are implanted on the front pectoral muscle on the right side of the chest and on the rib area on the left side of the chest.

Those are connected to a battery and generator which are adhered to the body externally. That piece, which is smaller than 3 square inches, also includes GPS and Bluetooth modules. “Once the patient goes into fibrilla-tion, if it’s not corrected we are able to tell first respond-ers where the patient is,” Ortiz said. “And if the compo-nents (of the device) malfunction or the battery is near depleted, we get a signal and can notify the cardiologist or the patient.”

There’s still a long way to go before the device could even be tested in humans, though. Ortiz said his team

is currently working on creating bench top prototypes of the device to use in proof-of-concept studies. From there, it will manufacture working prototypes and begin animal trials.

“The electronics are really very simple, and the imple-mentation of it is very simple,” Ortiz said. “Making sure it interfaces with the human body the right way is very complex.”

That’s the problem that the companies already in the ICD market have had over the past several years. The market hit bottom last year, in the words of one Gold-man Sachs analyst, but Medtronic CEO Omar Ishrak said last year he sees a light at the end of the tunnel. For one, Boston Scientific launched the first leadless or subcutaneous ICD earlier this year (developed by Cam-eron Health, which BSX bought in 2012), and apparently demand is already outpacing supply.

For AIS, its immediate success hinges on its ability to secure funding and partnerships. The company is near-ing completion of the ZeroTo510 accelerator program and will present at demo day Thursday.


Heart device (Continued)



Biomarker panel is company’s first step toward a tool for early detection of type 1 diabetes


A young diagnostics company has turned a $500,000 SBIR grant it won last year into an assay that it hopes will eventually help researchers and clinicians detect and diagnose type 1 diabetes earlier.

Genalyte Inc. today launched its first multiplexed antigen panel for type 1 di-abetes. The biomarker panel measures seven autoantibodies associated with the destruction of pancreatic islet cells that’s characteristic of the disease.

The product itself is a disposable silicon chip that goes into the company’s Maverick Detection System. Using a technology called silicon photonics, the device measures protein binding between antibodies and antigens in a single small sample. It eliminates the need for complex sample processing steps associated with current multiplexed testing, like washing, incubation and use of reagents, and delivers results within 15 minutes, the company says.

JDRF estimates that as many as 3 million Americans live with T1D, which is managed with careful attention to eating and activity, and administration of insulin injections. Symptoms often come on quickly, so diagnosis is often made in a hospital or emergency room. A biomarker test could be a helpful tool for clinicians, given that a strong pipeline of new devices and therapies for treatment of diabetes continues to advance.


Company:Genalyte Inc.

CEO & Co-Founder:Cary Gunn

Website:http://genalyte.com/

Twitter:@genalyte


“The unique capabilities of our Maverick detection platform have the potential to provide researchers and clinicians with tools to detect and track this process from an early stage, when interventions to interrupt the disease process may be feasible,” said Genalyte’s chief scientific officer, Martin Gleeson, in a statement.

For now, though, the panel is only available for research use. “It is our intention to continue to develop the T1D panel with the ultimate goal of providing a lab test and/or point of care test,” Gleeson said in an email. “We

cannot disclose timelines at this point in the develop-ment cycle.”

Meanwhile, the company is also developing a series of other panels for immune-related disorders and col-laborating with the Barbara Davis Diabetes Center at the University of Colorado on more advanced tools for identifying T1D.

The 6-year-old San Diego company is backed by Red-mile Group, Claremont Creek Ventures and other private investors.


Diabetes detection tool (Continued)



Applied Proteomics lands $28M for diagnostics that spot disease by capturing protein activity


“Most companies have come out of particular biological research and picked one horse to bet on,” said John Blume in explaining his company’s approach to developing a cancer diagnostic. “We’ve built a technology platform that takes a wide-angle view and lets data tell us what wins.”

Blume is the chief scientific officer of Applied Proteomics Inc., which has just landed a $28 million series C from investors to commercialize a biomarker for colon cancer.

Rather than using a person’s genome to assess his risk for cancer, like some cancer diagnostics companies are doing, API looks at the activity patterns of the proteins encoded by the genome. The genome might be useful in de-termining a person’s predisposition to developing a certain disease, but API thinks the activity of proteins is more useful in detecting the actual signs of cancer at their earliest stages.

Co-founder Dr. David Agus, the oncologist who co-founded Navigenics (acquired by Life Technologies in 2012), brought the scientific backing to the company when it started up in 2007. Equally important was Daniel Hillis, a renowned engineer and mathematician who helped create a more efficient biomarker discovery platform.

“(Our) technology takes dozens of steps and turns mass spectrometry into an industrialized process, which allows us to take beautiful pictures of proteomic


Company:Applied Proteomics Inc.

CEO:Peter Klemm

Website:http://www.appliedproteomics.com/

Twitter:@ProteomicsNow


data and sort out the good stuff,” Blume said.

API’s new $28 million infusion came from Genting Ber-had, an investment holding company in Malaysia, and existing investors Domain Associates and Vulcan Capi-tal. Some of it will go toward building a CLIA laboratory to conduct the mass-spectrometry assays.

Meanwhile, the company will continue to invest in large-scale clinical validation of its lead product, a blood test for pre-cursors to colorectal cancer that would help physicians direct high-risk patients toward colonoscopy.

CEO Peter Klemm said there are numerous other appli-cations for proteome-based diagnostics in the compa-ny’s pipeline, including diagnostics for cardiovascular disease, pancreatic cancer, Alzheimer’s disease and appendicitis.

“The ultimate vision is that the data cloud will be the test, that we can take a blood sample and look at the proteome to get a picture of health,” he said. “We are a long way from that, but that’s the ultimate vision.”


Applied Proteomics (Continued)



California startup creates less invasive device that aims to answer advanced fetal monitoring questions

By: Lindsey AlexanderAug 22, 2013

A California-based startup may finally help physicians monitor vital signs for fetuses of obese mothers, starting with heartrate. First Pulse Medical hopes to have the intrauterine device, which is noninvasive to the fetus, cleared with the FDA by the summer of 2014.

Right now, physicians use an ultrasound stomach belt to monitor fetal heart-rate, which doesn’t work for mothers who weigh more than 200 pounds. The other fetal monitoring option, and what must be used if the ultrasound device isn’t a good fit, is the scalp electrode needle, a device that screws into the baby’s scalp. If the mother has hepatitis, HIV or certain other infections, the second option can’t be used either–forcing doctors to go without vital signs for the fetus during labor. If the fetus goes unmonitored, even for just a few moments, it puts the baby at risk of serious health problems and the hospital and physician in serious liability issues.

First Pulse’s device uses proprietary light-based technology to display FHR on existing bedside equipment.

The startup has tested the device in Europe, redesigned a prototype based on that feedback, was accepted (and moved in) to the incubator at the Fogarty Innovation Institute earlier this year, has earned several patents and should have its first in-man trial finished by mid-September 2013. (Shwoosh.) It’s closed a round of seed funding and is currently courting investors who


Company:First Pulse Medical

CEO:Nathan Bachtell

Website:http://www.fogartyinstitute.org/docs/First-Pulse_Flyer.pdf


have a presence in the women’s health space for its next round of $2 to $3 million.

But it doesn’t stop there. First Pulse CEO Nathan Bachtell said the company plans to use this platform technology to go way beyond the bounds of fetal heart-rate monitoring.

“If any of us walks into an emergency room, physicians can get 20 pieces of information on us in 10 minutes. The physician takes all that information and processes it together to make an initial assessment of what is going on with us,” Bachtell said. “We want to begin to try and allow for that type of monitoring for the fetus–to begin to give the physician an array of diagnostic information on the fetus.”

The company hopes to move quickly into monitoring fetal circulatory, respiratory and oxygen statuses.

Bachtell has a background in critical care and continues to moonlight in emergency rooms to maintain a clinical presence.

“I think it’s really important that there are physicians working in the industry that develop new devices and drugs because it’s really important that those things aren’t developed in a vacuum,” he said. In fact, the idea for First Pulse came from an obstetrician who had deliv-ered more than 15,000 babies. Bachtell heard about the company because of a presentation at Mass General and was an early investor. So, in some ways, becoming CEO brought the project full circle.

He plans to use the time the company has at the Foga-rty Institute to seek mentors and advisers in regulatory and legal areas, as well as continuing to strengthen its intellectual property position. Currently, the company is working with the team at WSGR.


Fetal monitoring (Continued)


Diagnostic to predict risk of esophageal cancer raises $1.4 million – Aug 1, 2013

A molecular diagnostics company is raising fresh capital for a test to predict the likelihood of a precancerous con-dition becoming esophageal cancer. The idea is that by detecting the condition earlier and more accurately, it could lead to better outcomes.

http://bit.ly/14IfpU4

Startup Activity: Medical Devices & Diagnostics

Air purification system to reduce hospital acquired infections raising $2M – Aug 7, 2013

LifeAire Systems’ in-duct air purification system is designed to improve air quality in critical areas for hospitals. The company that’s applying its air purification technology for in vitro fertilization labs to the international problem of hospital acquired infections is raising fresh capital.

http://bit.ly/1bcAcFx

How your DNA may write your next drug prescription – Aug 8, 2013

In the back seat of a taxi, on the way home from oral arguments in the AMP v. Myriad Genetics Supreme Court case, Chris Mason and Jeffrey Rosenfeld decided to start a company. Now free to work with thousands of genes that had been patented, the duo wanted to provide a service that would give consumers direct access to their own genomic data.

http://bit.ly/1cgcZ9r

Stanford spinoff goes data-mining for a better diagnostic for preeclampsia – Aug 8, 2013

Carmenta Bisocience was spun out of Stanford University last year to commercialize a better way for obstetricians to predict and diagnose the precursor to the condition, preeclampsia.

http://bit.ly/1cgM8Kp

EcoSurg secures third round of funding, plans to keep scaling up – Aug 8, 2013

Memphis medical products startup EcoSurg has secured a third round of capital from Innova Memphis and MB Ven-ture Partners. Their disposable patient positioners are pads used to cushion patients during surgery.

http://bit.ly/19dO3y8


How a cotton candy machine gave this NSF-funded, Indiana-based wound-healing startup its first big idea – Aug 9, 2013

When two students working at Purdue University’s Center for Paralysis Research were making small talk around the office cotton candy machine, they didn’t have an inkling that it might lead to business competitions, grants, NSF Small Business Innovation Research funding, a patent and a startup. But that’s exactly how Medtric Biotech began its foray into wound healing.

http://bit.ly/16F7GeM


Serial entrepreneur’s noninvasive device uses eye to measure intracranial pressure – Aug 9, 2013

Third Eye Diagnostics has received a $500,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to advance its novel approach to getting an accurate measure for intracranial pressure through the eye.

http://bit.ly/14tBc6t

A chronic heart failure treatment focuses on heart’s use of energy – Aug 13, 2013

A couple of medical school professors at the University of Pennsylvania are using bioenergetics to address the ener-gy consumption problems associated with advanced chronic heart failure.

http://bit.ly/16Ispwd

St. Jude Medical banks $170M on contact force ablation tech in growing A-fib market – Aug 19, 2013

As predicted, the next incremental advances in the growing A-fib heart space may very well be in contact force cath-eter technology. St. Jude’s Medical is banking on it. The company just acquired Endosense, a Switzerland company that creates contact force ablation catheter technology, for $170 million.

http://bit.ly/16ZYC4l

Can this startup raise $650K from the crowd to launch at-home breast imaging device? – Aug 20, 2013

An at-home, hand-held breast imaging device could help women see abnormalities between mammograms–if Eclipse Breast Health Technologies meets its $650,000 Indiegogo goal.

http://bit.ly/1664rbY


GE invests in Afib market, helps minimally invasive imaging and mapping startup close $28M Series B round – Aug 20, 2013

GE Ventures helped Acutus Medical to close a $28 million Series B round. The San Diego-based startup is working to develop a minimally invasive, real-time 3-D Cardiac Chamber Imaging and Dipole Density Mapping system.

http://bit.ly/13Pp1xq


Adhesive tape replaces a skin biopsy in new, noninvasive test for melanoma – Aug 21, 2013

If a doctor suspects a mole or skin spot might be cancerous, she cuts or shaves off a skin sample and sends it to a lab for testing. With a new test being developed by biotechnology company DermTech, that sample could be taken without an anesthetic or risking a scar.

http://bit.ly/1arnNzZ

ASU spinout lands $4M for early-stage cancer detection diagnostic – Aug 21, 2013

HealthTell Inc. has raised $4 million to commercialize a test for lung, breast, prostate and colorectal cancer. The Chandler, Ariz.-based startup is working on monitoring tools to check the status of patients who are battling any of 30 illnesses, ranging from cancer to infectious disease.

http://bit.ly/1f31JJu

Remote health monitoring startup lands $525K in third angel round – Aug 21, 2013

Stamford, Conn.-based AmbioHealth raised $525,000 in equity to close out its third angel round. The company will use the money to continue developing its remote health monitoring system and its compatible activity monitoring system.

http://bit.ly/1d5U28N

Nurse entrepreneur solves neck pain by inventing stethoscope clip – Aug 22, 2013

One RN’s battle with a herniated disc led to a device that lets users clip stethoscopes onto the waistband of scrubs or pants.

http://bit.ly/1dw1U23


Mom’s design challenge to sons results in fix for common colonoscopy problem – Aug 23, 2013

ColoWrap is an elastic fabric belt resembling a much thinner version of a weightlifting belt developed by James and John Hathorn - sons of Dr. Marybeth Spanarkel. The company has raised its first seed money from six angel inves-tors.

http://bit.ly/19OqvQL


Shock absorbers for the human body? Implant could help active patients avoid total knee replacements longer – Aug 27, 2013

Moximed could help active and young patients who have osteoarthritis prolong the amount of time before total knee replacement. The Zurich, Switzerland-based company’s Kinespring Knee Implant System is a medical device that absorbs part of the load put on the knee, without changing anatomy.

http://bit.ly/16Kqa9z

Super scrubs! Vestagen raises $8.3M to turn medical gear into a shield against bacteria – Aug 27, 2013

A new line of apparel called Vestex is trying to scratch healthcare worker’s garments from the list of suspects in spreading bugs in a healthcare setting. Investors have just backed the makers of the apparel with a $8.3 million Se-ries A to apply for FDA medical device clearance and launch the line of products.

http://bit.ly/16Lo3Cv

Will this 2013 Innovation of the Year device change the standard of care for port site clo-sures? – Aug 28, 2013

Irish medical device startup NeoSurgical‘s first commercialized product, neoClose officially launched this week in the U.S. NeoClose assists surgeons in closing port site defects after laparoscopic abdominal surgery.

http://bit.ly/1dQ0foa


Most Popular Startups This Month

2) Mutualink

In the not-too-distant future, Google Glass could be as essential to firefighters as the water hose.

So argues communications company Mutualink, which is working on applications for Glass that would give first responders a variety of new and powerful tools to help them do their jobs.

To use the most obvious — and interesting — example, consider how Glass could change how firefighters approach an emergency. Rather than rush blindly into a burning building, firefighters can on the fly pull up the blueprints for the building and use them to plan their entry. That could save not only the lives of others, but potentially those of the firefighters themselves.

Read more: http://bit.ly/13ANhZr

1) EyeSpy 20/20

Using the 150-year-old eye chart today is a little like riding a horse and buggy around town, in the eyes of Richard Tirendi. To bring vision screening up-to-date and remove some of the human variability and subjectivity in it, Tirendi and his eye surgeon friend reinvented the eye chart in the form of a computer game.

It’s called EyeSpy 20/20, and it disguises basic vision screening for kids in the form of a virtual treasure hunt that has them answer questions, match letters and wear an eye patch while playing a game.

Read more: http://bit.ly/16KOURo

3) Lagnosis Teledermatology is one telemedicine segment that’s been growing ... Read more: http://bit.ly/13fciUH

4) Smartphone biosensor A new smartphone biosensor may provide ... Read more: http://bit.ly/1ci9SwP

5) Exosome Diagnostic, Inc. EXO106 is a non-invasive in vitro diagnostic ... Read more: http://bit.ly/17m0FO0

A list of the five startups that got the most attention from readers on MedCityNews.com.


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