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What top VCs look for in women’s fertility startups
A number of promising women’s health tech companies have popped up in the last few years, from fertility apps to ovulation bracelets — even Apple has jumped into the subject with the addition of period tracking built into the latest edition of the watch. But there hasn’t been much in the way of innovation in women’s sexual health for decades.
In-vitro fertilization (IVF) is now a 40-year-old invention and even the top pharmaceutical companies have spent a pittance on research and development. Subjects like polycystic ovarian syndrome, endometriosis and menopause have taken a backseat to other, more fatal concerns. Fertility is itself oftentimes a mysterious black box as well, though a full 10% of the female population in the United States has difficulty getting or staying pregnant.
That’s all starting to change as startups are now bringing in millions in venture capital to gather and treat women’s health. While it’s early days (no unicorns just yet) interest in the subject has been jumping steadily higher each year.
To shine a better light on the importance of tech’s role in spurring more innovation for women’s fertility, we asked five VCs passionate about the space for their investment strategies, including Sarah Cone (Social Impact Capital), Vanessa Larco (NEA), Anu Duggal (Female Founders Fund), Jess Lee (Sequoia) and Nancy Brown (Oak HC/FT).
Sarah Cone, Social Impact Capital
Sarah Cone, Social Impact Capital
We’re interested in companies that create large data sets in women’s health and fertility, enabling personalized medicine, clinical trial virtualization, better patient outcomes, and the application of modern AI/ML techniques to generate hypotheses that discover new targets and molecules.
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Watch biotech startups pitch at IndieBio’s demo day today
IndieBio, the biotech startup accelerator that’s produced heaps of notable companies (including several that have graced the Startup Battlefield), is holding its twice-annual demo day today at 3PM Pacific Time. An even dozen young companies will be pitching their work, from AI-informed research to artificial meat, and you can watch them present live right here.
The IndieBio program is a four-month one that takes companies at the seed stage, often researchers straight out of graduate programs or university research groups, and gets them into shape for a proper Silicon Valley debut. Right now the companies get $250K in funding to take part, as well as plenty of resources, which parent VC firm SOSV can surely afford these days, what with raising $150 million last year.
Off the top of my head I remember two companies that competed at Disrupt SF 2016, Amaryllis Nucleics and mFluiDx, both very technical and highly talented teams. I’m always rooting for these kinds of wet lab companies, and it sounds like the current batch has plenty.
Watch the live pitches starting at 3PM below, and consult the list below the video for a summary of the companies presenting. We’ll be watching too!
New Age Meats: Pig farms are hell on earth. New Age Meats is a “cell-based meat company” that’s looking to replace animal-based pork sausage with a cleaner, more ethical grown alternative that goes just as well with pancakes.
NovoNutrients: Another non-traditional protein source, NovoNutrients uses industrial CO2 emissions to produce high-protein bacteria, which are harvested and sold as sustainable feed stock for aquaculture animals like fish.
BioRosa: An early detection method for autism spectrum disorders using blood tests that could shift diagnosis time to well before the current four years of age to potentially before the child is born.
Chronus Health: Hospitals need to do blood tests constantly, but often have to send samples to a central lab, which can take hours or days. Chronus has made a portable device they claim can provide complete blood count and metabolic panel tests essentially in real time.
Clinicai: Colorectal cancer, like other cancers, is best treated when detected early — and collecting and analyzing stool samples is a big part of that. These guys made a (prototype) device that attaches to ordinary toilets and non-invasively does what it needs to do, which could help people worldwide get proactive diagnosis and care.
Convalesce: Parkinson’s is a stubborn and tragic disease, but Convalesce is working on a treatment method involving injecting stem cells directly into areas affected by neurodegeneration.
Oralta: You can floss, brush, and rinse, but bad news bacteria are still going to take up residence in your mouth. Oralta hopes to combat them with good bacteria, reinforced by probiotic supplements. Fight fire with fire!
Ember: If someone is having a heart attack and it’ll take the EMTs 8-12 minutes to arrive, but your neighbor is a nurse trained in CPR, wouldn’t it be nice if they could stop by and help? That’s the idea with Ember, which hopes to improve outcomes by connecting patients with health professionals nearby.
Filtricine: The cancer treatment method being pursued by this company, instead of adding something lethal to cancer cells into the bloodstream, subtracts what they need to live while leaving normal cells unharmed. It could combine effectiveness with a blessed lack of side effects to become another tool in oncologists’ arsenals.
Serenity Bioworks: Gene therapy is another important therapeutic tool for a variety of problems, but some viral delivery methods can be fought by the body as if it’s fighting infection. Serenity is working on a system that suppresses that immune response and allows the friendly virus to deliver its payload.
Quartolio: So much scientific literature is published every year that there’s no way doctors and researchers can keep up. Quartolio aims to apply national language processing to journal articles to find connections and research opportunities that might otherwise have gone unnoticed.
Stämm: Bioreactors are used in practically every branch of biotech, whether for testing or drug manufacturing. Stämm is advancing the art with a modular, scalable microfluidic platform with highly tunable physical and chemical parameters.
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China is funding the future of American biotech
Silicon Valley is in the midst of a health craze, and it is being driven by “Eastern” medicine.
It’s been a record year for US medical investing, but investors in Beijing and Shanghai are now increasingly leading the largest deals for US life science and biotech companies. In fact, Chinese venture firms have invested more this year into life science and biotech in the US than they have back home, providing financing for over 300 US-based companies, per Pitchbook. That’s the story at Viela Bio, a Maryland-based company exploring treatments for inflammation and autoimmune diseases, which raised a $250 million Series A led by three Chinese firms.
Chinese capital’s newfound appetite also flows into the mainland. Business is booming for Chinese medical startups, who are also seeing the strongest year of venture investment ever, with over one hundred companies receiving $4 billion in investment.
As Chinese investors continue to shift their strategies towards life science and biotech, China is emphatically positioning itself to be a leader in medical investing with a growing influence on the world’s future major health institutions.
Chinese VCs seek healthy returns
We like to talk about things we can interact with or be entertained by. And so as nine-figure checks flow in and out of China with stunning regularity, we fixate on the internet giants, the gaming leaders or the latest media platform backed by Tencent or Alibaba.
However, if we follow the money, it’s clear that the top venture firms in China have actually been turning their focus towards the country’s deficient health system.
A clear leader in China’s strategy shift has been Sequoia Capital China, one of the country’s most heralded venture firms tied to multiple billion-dollar IPOs just this year.
Historically, Sequoia didn’t have much interest in the medical sector. Health was one of the firm’s smallest investment categories, and it participated in only three health-related deals from 2015-16, making up just 4% of its total investing activity.
Recently, however, life sciences have piqued Sequoia’s fascination, confirms a spokesperson with the firm. Sequoia dove into six health-related deals in 2017 and has already participated in 14 in 2018 so far. The firm now sits among the most active health investors in China and the medical sector has become its second biggest investment area, with life science and biotech companies accounting for nearly 30% of its investing activity in recent years.
Health-related investment data for 2015-18 compiled from Pitchbook, Crunchbase, and SEC Edgar
There’s no shortage of areas in need of transformation within Chinese medical care, and a wide range of strategies are being employed by China’s VCs. While some investors hope to address influenza, others are focused on innovative treatments for hypertension, diabetes and other chronic diseases.
For instance, according to the Chinese Journal of Cancer, in 2015, 36% of world’s lung cancer diagnoses came from China, yet the country’s cancer survival rate was 17% below the global average. Sequoia has set its sights on tackling China’s high rate of cancer and its low survival rate, with roughly 70% of its deals in the past two years focusing on cancer detection and treatment.
That is driven in part by investments like the firm’s $90 million Series A investment into Shanghai-based JW Therapeutics, a company developing innovative immunotherapy cancer treatments. The company is a quintessential example of how Chinese VCs are building the country’s next set of health startups using their international footprints and learnings from across the globe.
Founded as a joint-venture offshoot between US-based Juno Therapeutics and China’s WuXi AppTec, JW benefits from Juno’s experience as a top developer of cancer immunotherapy drugs, as well as WuXi’s expertise as one of the world’s leading contract research organizations, focusing on all aspects of the drug R&D and development cycle.
Specifically, JW is focused on the next-generation of cell-based immunotherapy cancer treatments using chimeric antigen receptor T-cell (CAR-T) technologies. (Yeah…I know…) For the WebMD warriors and the rest of us with a medical background that stopped at tenth-grade chemistry, CAR-T essentially looks to attack cancer cells by utilizing the body’s own immune system.
Past waves of biotech startups often focused on other immunologic treatments that used genetically-modified antibodies created in animals. The antibodies would effectively act as “police,” identifying and attaching to “bad guy” targets in order to turn off or quiet down malignant cells. CAR-T looks instead to modify the body’s native immune cells to attack and kill the bad guys directly.
Chinese VCs are investing in a wide range of innovative life science and biotech startups. (Photo by Eugeneonline via Getty Images)
The international and interdisciplinary pedigree of China’s new medical leaders not only applies to the organizations themselves but also to those running the show.
At the helm of JW sits James Li. In a past life, the co-founder and CEO held stints as an executive heading up operations in China for the world’s biggest biopharmaceutical companies including Amgen and Merck. Li was also once a partner at the Silicon Valley brand-name investor, Kleiner Perkins.
JW embodies the benefits that can come from importing insights and expertise, a practice that will come to define the companies leading the medical future as the country’s smartest capital increasingly finds its way overseas.
GV and Founders Fund look to keep the Valley competitive
Despite heavy investment by China’s leading VCs, Silicon Valley is doubling down in the US health sector. (AFP PHOTO / POOL / JASON LEE)
Innovation in medicine transcends borders. Sickness and death are unfortunately universal, and groundbreaking discoveries in one country can save lives in the rest.
The boom in China’s life science industry has left valuations lofty and cross-border investment and import regulations in China have improved.
As such, Chinese venture firms are now increasingly searching for innovation abroad, looking to capitalize on expanding opportunities in the more mature US medical industry that can offer innovative technologies and advanced processes that can be brought back to the East.
In April, Qiming Venture Partners, another Chinese venture titan, closed a $120 million fund focused on early-stage US healthcare. Qiming has been ramping up its participation in the medical space, investing in 24 companies over the 2017-18 period.
New firms diving into the space hasn’t frightened the Bay Area’s notable investors, who have doubled down in the US medical space alongside their Chinese counterparts.
Partner directories for America’s most influential firms are increasingly populated with former doctors and medically-versed VCs who can find the best medical startups and have a growing influence on the flow of venture dollars in the US.
At the top of the list is Krishna Yeshwant, the GV (formerly Google Ventures) general partner leading the firm’s aggressive push into the medical industry.
Krishna Yeshwant (GV) at TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2017
A doctor by trade, Yeshwant’s interest runs the gamut of the medical spectrum, leading investments focusing on anything from real-time patient care insights to antibody and therapeutic technologies for cancer and neurodegenerative disorders.
Per data from Pitchbook and Crunchbase, Krishna has been GV’s most active partner over the past two years, participating in deals that total over a billion dollars in aggregate funding.
Backed by the efforts of Yeshwant and select others, the medical industry has become one of the most prominent investment areas for Google’s venture capital arm, driving roughly 30% of its investments in 2017 compared to just under 15% in 2015.
GV’s affinity for medical-investing has found renewed life, but life science is also part of the firm’s DNA. Like many brand-name Valley investors, GV founder Bill Maris has long held a passion for the health startups. After leaving GV in 2016, Maris launched his own fund, Section 32, focused specifically on biotech, healthcare and life sciences.
In the same vein, life science and health investing has been part of the lifeblood for some major US funds including Founders Fund, which has consistently dedicated over 25% of its deployed capital to the space since at least 2015.
The tides may be changing, however, as the recent expansion of oversight for the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) may severely impact the flow of Chinese capital into areas of the US health sector.
Under its extended purview, CFIUS will review – and possibly block – any investment or transaction involving a foreign entity related to the production, design or testing of technology that falls under a list of 27 critical industries, including biotech research and development.
The true implications of the expanded rules will depend on how aggressively and how often CFIUS exercises its power. But a lengthy review process and the threat of regulatory blocks may significantly increase the burden on Chinese investors, effectively shutting off the Chinese money spigot.
Regardless of CFIUS, while China’s active presence in the US health markets hasn’t deterred Valley mainstays, with a severely broken health system and an improved investment environment backed by government support, China’s commitment to medical innovation is only getting stronger.
VCs target a disastrous health system
Deficiencies in China’s health sector has historically led to troublesome outcomes. Now the government is jump-starting investment through supportive policy. (Photo by Alexander Tessmer / EyeEm via Getty Images)
They say successful startups identify real problems that need solving. Marred with inefficiencies, poor results, and compounding consumer frustration, China’s health industry has many.
Outside of a wealthy few, citizens are forced to make often lengthy treks to overcrowded and understaffed hospitals in urban centers. Reception areas exist only in concept, as any open space is quickly filled by hordes of the concerned, sick, and fearful settling in for wait times that can last multiple days.
If and when patients are finally seen, they are frequently met by overworked or inexperienced medical staff, rushing to get people in and out in hopes of servicing the endless line behind them.
Historically, when patients were diagnosed, treatment options were limited and ineffective, as import laws and affordability issues made many globally approved drugs unavailable.
As one would assume, poor detection and treatment have led to problematic outcomes. Heart disease, stroke, diabetes and chronic lung disease accounts for 80% of deaths in China, according to a recent report from the World Bank.
Recurring issues of misconduct, deception and dishonesty have amplified the population’s mounting frustration.
After past cases of widespread sickness caused by improperly handled vaccinations, China’s vaccine crisis reached a breaking point earlier this year. It was revealed that 250,000 children had been given defective and fallacious rabies vaccinations, a fact that inspectors had discovered months prior and swept under the rug.
Fracturing public trust around medical treatment has serious, potentially destabilizing effects. And with deficiencies permeating nearly all aspects of China’s health and medical infrastructure, there is a gaping set of opportunities for disruptive change.
In response to these issues, China’s government placed more emphasis on the search for medical innovation by rolling out policies that improve the chances of success for health startups, while reducing costs and risk for investors.
Billions of public investment flooded into the life science sector, and easier approval processes for patents, research grants, and generic drugs, suddenly made the prospect of building a life science or biotech company in China less daunting.
For Chinese venture capitalists, on top of financial incentives and a higher-growth local medical sector, loosening of drug import laws opened up opportunities to improve China’s medical system through innovation abroad.
Liquidity has also improved due to swelling global interest in healthcare. Plus, the Hong Kong Stock Exchange recently announced changes to allow the listing of pre-revenue biotech companies.
The changes implemented across China’s major institutions have effectively provided Chinese health investors with a much broader opportunity set, faster growth companies, faster liquidity, and increased certainty, all at lower cost.
However, while the structural and regulatory changes in China’s healthcare system has led to more medical startups with more growth, it hasn’t necessarily driven quality.
US and Western investors haven’t taken the same cross-border approach as their peers in Beijing. From talking with those in the industry, the laxity of the Chinese system, and others, have made many US investors weary of investing in life science companies overseas.
And with the Valley similarly stepping up its focus on startups that sprout from the strong American university system, bubbling valuations have started to raise concern.
But with China dedicating more and more billions across the globe, the country is determined to patch the massive holes in its medical system and establish itself as the next leader in international health innovation.
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uBiome is jumping into therapeutics with a healthy $83 million in Series C financing
23andMe, IBM and now uBiome is the next tech company to jump into the lucrative multi-billion dollar drug discovery market.
The company started out with a consumer gut health test to check whether your intestines carry the right kind of bacteria for healthy digestion but has since expanded to include over 250,000 samples for everything from the microbes on your skin to vaginal health — the largest data set in the world for these types of samples, according to the company.
Founder Jessica Richman now says there’s a wider opportunity to use this data to create value in therapeutics.
To support its new drug discovery efforts, the San Francisco-based startup will be moving its therapeutics unit into new Cambridge, Massachusetts headquarters and appointing former Novartis CEO Joseph Jimenez to the board of directors as well.
The company has a healthy pile of cash to help build out that new HQ, too, with a fresh $83 million Series C, lead by OS Fund and in participation with 8VC, Y Combinator, Dentsu Ventures and others.
The drug discovery market is slated to be worth nearly $86 billion by 2022, according to BCC Research numbers. New technologies — those that solve logistics issues and shorten the time between research and getting a drug to market in particular — are driving the growth and that’s where uBiome thinks it can get into the game.
“This financing allows us to expand our product portfolio, increase our focus on patent assets and further raise our clinical profile, especially as we begin to focus on commercialization of drug discovery and development of our patent assets,” Richman said.
Though its unclear at this time which drug maker the company might partner up with, Richman did say there would be plenty to announce later on that front.
So far, the company has published over 30 peer-reviewed papers on microbiome research, has entered into research partnerships with the likes of the Center for Disease Control (CDC) and leading research institutions such as Harvard, MIT and Stanford and has previously raised $22 million in funding. The additional VC cash puts the total amount raised to $105 million to date.
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CB Therapeutics’ lab-grown cannabinoids could unlock new medicines and make others affordable
Marijuana may still be on shaky legal ground, but the therapeutic benefits of the psychoactive molecules — cannabinoids — inside the plant are solidly established. Unfortunately, cultivation of that plant is resource-intensive and yields only tiny amounts of some useful medicines. CB Therapeutics, a new biotech company launching today at the Disrupt SF Startup Battlefield, aims to change the game with cannabinoids produced cleanly and cheaply in the lab — out of sugar.
Co-founder and CEO Sher Ali Butt says the idea struck him when he was working at cannabis testing lab Steep Hill. CBD, a compound found in the plant but in much lower concentrations than THC, the primary intoxicant, was producing extremely helpful pain and anxiety alleviation for some people without a high. The medicinal possibilities were obvious, but high-CBD strains of cannabis are not only uncommon, but a pain to cultivate and process for that purpose.
“CBD had all these applications, and I just thought that there’s got to be a better way to do this. The idea just stuck in my brain,” he told me.
After working on the problem on and off for years he decided to pursue it in earnest. Serendipitously, around this time he ran into Jacob Vogan, an old friend from college who was working in the field of bioengineering. It seemed like a natural fit to them to start the company together.
What CB Therapeutics has done is bioengineer microorganisms — specifically yeast — to manufacture cannabinoids out of plain-old sugars. This type of bioreactor isn’t a new idea; yeast and other organisms are used to create and isolate lots of drugs and substances.
“The vitamin C that we take in tablets, for instance — they didn’t squeeze oranges and lemons to get that,” Butt points out. “There isn’t enough agriculture to supply the global demand. It was produced synthetically and put in a box.”
CB Therapeutics is just doing the same thing for cannabinoids, and not just CBD.
“There are 118 cannabinoids, and only five have been studied,” Butt says. “These compounds are like .1, .01, even .001 percent in the cannabis bud. When you want to extract these, a kilogram can be like $100,000 to $350,000. How is someone supposed to do research with that?”
But the yeast don’t care. They take in sugar and output whatever molecule their biosynthesis pathway has been modified to produce — within reason, of course. You couldn’t output large, complex non-organics, but cannabinoids — even the rare ones — are well within their capabilities.
“The only thing we need to add is sugar — that’s the beauty of what we’ve done,” Butt beamed. “The yeast platform is agnostic, it makes everything for the same price.”
This has several benefits. First, it can bring down the price of a known and useful cannabinoid like CBD. Second, it allows the rarer ones to be studied for a reasonable price, and eventually distributed as well. And third, it takes pressure off the agricultural component of the cannabis industry.
That last is not only good from an ecological perspective, since demand is growing and these plants require a lot of water and land, but from the health side as well. Butt points out that a huge majority of cannabis products tested are found to be contaminated to some degree with pesticides and other unwanted compounds.
It’s getting better as the marijuana industry becomes an above-board one, but the problem is far from eliminated, and at any rate pesticides and other potentially harmful chemicals don’t cease to be a nuisance just because something is legal. The risk is there for the foreseeable future that, ironically, the “natural” option of using the plant itself is going to produce more impurities in the product, not less. But the yeast don’t — can’t, really — taint the product. So what comes out of the bioreactor should theoretically be as pure as the driven snow. (CB Therapeutics does test it, of course.)
It’s worth noting that the company’s main intellectual property is is the cannabinoid biosynthesis pathway it has developed. That hadn’t been fully documented or explored, Butt says, until their work.
Butt sees this change as more or less just the latest example of a useful class of molecules going from difficult to relatively easy to acquire.
“When you aren’t able to provide for the demand, that makes prices artificially high. People are going out and spending tens of thousands on CBD, for medical applications,” he said. “Insulin used to be harvested from pig pancreases, then Genentech solved that. Aspirin used to come from tree bark. This is inevitable for many compounds. We need to bring the cannabis price down to where anybody can use it.”
The pricing and volume are still somewhat of a question mark — once testing and the regulatory hurdles are taken care of, like any pharmaceutical it’s going to be a moving target. But scaling production shouldn’t be hard should the demand grow, and the backlog of new cannabinoids to isolate for testing should provide a source of income as well.
Medicine can be a risky sector for startups but CB Therapeutics seems to have it as close to sewn up as one can reasonably expect; in a way it’s almost alchemical, this ability to cheaply produce something so valuable. But really, it’s just science.
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ReviveMed turns drug discovery into a big data problem and raises $1.5M to solve it
What if there’s a drug that already exists that could treat a disease with no known therapies, but we just haven’t made the connection? Finding that connection by exhaustively analyzing complex biomechanics within the body — with the help of machine learning, naturally — is the goal of ReviveMed, a new biotech startup out of MIT that just raised $1.5 million in seed funding.
Around the turn of the century, genomics was the big thing. Then, as the power to investigate complex biological processes improved, proteomics became the next frontier. We may have moved on again, this time to the yet more complex field of metabolomics, which is where ReviveMed comes in.
Leila Pirhaji, ReviveMed’s founder and CEO, began work on the topic during her time as a postgrad at MIT. The problem she and her colleagues saw was the immense complexity of interactions between proteins, which are encoded in DNA and RNA, and metabolites, a class of biomolecules with even greater variety. Hidden in these innumerable interactions somewhere are clues to how and why biological processes are going wrong, and perhaps how to address that.
“The interaction of proteins and metabolites tells us exactly what’s happening in the disease,” Pirhaji told me. “But there are over 40,000 metabolites in the human body. DNA and RNA are easy to measure, but metabolites have tremendous diversity in mass. Each one requires its own experiment to detect.”
As you can imagine, the time and money that would be involved in such an extensive battery of testing have made metabolomics difficult to study. But what Pirhaji and her collaborators at MIT decided was that it was similar enough to other “big noisy data set” problems that the nascent approach of machine learning could be effective.
“Instead of doing experiments,” Pirhaji said, “why don’t we use AI and our database?” To that end she founded ReviveMed with her PhD advisor, Ernest Fraenkel, and shortly afterwards was joined by data scientist Demarcus Briers and biotech veteran Richard Howell.
Pharmaceutical companies and research organizations already have a mess of metabolites masses, known interactions, suspected but unproven effects and disease states and outcomes. Plenty of experimentation is done, but the results are frustratingly vague owing to the inability to be sure about the metabolites themselves or what they’re doing. Most experimentation has resulted in partial understanding of a small proportion of known metabolites.
That data isn’t just a few drives’ worth of spreadsheets and charts, either. Not only does the data comprise drug-protein, protein-protein, protein-metabolite and metabolite-disease interactions, but they’re including data that’s essentially never been analyzed: “We’re looking at metabolites that no one has looked at before.”
The information is sitting in an archive somewhere, gathering dust. “We actually have to go physically pick up the mass spectrometry files,” Pirhaji said. (“They’re huge,” she added.)
Once they got the data all in one place (Pirhaji described it as “a big hairball with millions of interactions,” in a presentation in March), they developed a model to evaluate and characterize everything in it, producing the kind of insights machine learning systems are known for.
The “hairball.”
The results were more than a little promising. In a trial run, they identified new disease mechanisms for Huntington’s, new therapeutic targets (i.e. biomolecules or processes that could be affected by drugs) and existing drugs that may affect those targets.
The secret sauce, or one ingredient anyway, is the ability to distinguish metabolites with similar masses (sugars or fats with different molecular configurations but the same number and type of atoms, for instance) and correlate those metabolites with both drug and protein effects and disease outcomes. The metabolome fills in the missing piece between disease and drug without any tests establishing it directly.
At that point the drug will, of course, require real-world testing. But although ReviveMed does do some verification on its own, this is when the company would hand back the results to its clients, pharmaceutical companies, which then take the drug and its new effect to market.
In effect, the business model is offering a low-cost, high-reward R&D as a service to pharma, which can hand over reams of data it has no particular use for, potentially resulting in practical applications for drugs that already have millions invested in their testing and manufacture. What wouldn’t Pfizer pay to determine that Robitussin also prevents Alzheimer’s? That knowledge is worth billions, and ReviveMed is offering a new, powerful way to check for such things with little in the way of new investment.
This is the kind of web of molecules and effects that the system sorts through.
ReviveMed, for its part, is being a bit more choosy than that — its focus is on untreatable diseases with a good chance that existing drugs affect them. The first target is fatty liver disease, which affects millions, causing great suffering and cost. And something like Huntington’s, in which genetic triggers and disease effects are known but not the intermediate mechanisms, is also a good candidate for which the company’s models can fill the gap.
The company isn’t reliant on Big Pharma for its data, though. The original training data was all public (though “very fragmented”) and it’s that on which the system is primarily based. “We have a patent on our process for getting this metabolome data and translating it into insights,” Pirhaji notes, although the work they did at MIT is available for anyone to access (it was published in Nature Methods, in case you were wondering).
But compared with genomics and proteomics, not much metabolomic data is public — so although ReviveMed can augment its database with data from clients, its researchers are also conducting hundreds of human tests on their own to improve the model.
The business model is a bit complicated, as well — “It’s very case by case,” Pirhaji told me. A research hospital looking to collaborate and share data while sharing any results publicly or as shared intellectual property, for instance, would not be a situation where a lot of cash would change hands. But a top-5 pharma company — two of which ReviveMed already has dealings with — that wants to keep all the results for itself and has limitless coffers would pay a higher cost.
I’m oversimplifying, but you get the idea. In many cases, however, ReviveMed will aim to be a part of any intellectual property it contributes to. And of course the data provided by the clients goes into the model and improves it, which is its own form of payment. So you can see that negotiations might get complicated. But the company already has several revenue-generating pilots in place, so even at this early stage those complications are far from insurmountable.
Lastly there’s the matter of the seed round: $1.5 million, led by Rivas Capital along with TechU, Team Builder Ventures and WorldQuant. This should allow them to hire the engineers and data scientists they need and expand in other practical ways. Placing well in a recent Google machine learning competition got them $200,000 worth of cloud computing credit, so that should keep them crunching for a while.
ReviveMed’s approach is a fundamentally modern one that wouldn’t be possible just a few years ago, such is the scale of the data involved. It may prove to be a powerful example of data-driven biotech as lucrative as it is beneficial. Even the early proof-of-concept and pilot work may provide help to millions or save lives — it’s not every day a company is founded that can say that.
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MIT cuts ties with brain preservation startup Nectome
MIT is disassociating itself from Nectome, the Y Combinator-backed startup promising to preserve customers’ brains for the possibility of future digital upload.
Co-founder Robert McIntyre described the procedure as “100 percent fatal” — it involves connecting terminally ill patients to a machine that pumps embalming fluids into their arteries.
The company has collected (refundable) $10,000 payments for a wait list, but its website now carries a note in “Response to recent press,” suggesting that the company would only carry the procedure out after further research:
We believe that clinical human brain preservation has immense potential to benefit humanity, but only if it is developed in the light, with input from medical and neuroscience experts. We believe that rushing to apply vitrification today would be extremely irresponsible and hurt eventual adoption of a validated protocol.
As noted in the MIT Technology Review, MIT has been criticized for potentially giving the company credibility by association — MIT Media Lab professor Edward Boyden was receiving money through a federal grant won by Nectome. (McIntyre and his co-founder Michael McCanna are both MIT graduates.)
Now the Media Lab has released a statement saying that after reviewing “the scientific premises underlying the company’s commercial plans, as well as certain public statements that the company has made,” it will “terminate the subcontract between MIT and Nectome in accordance with the terms of their agreement.”
The Media Lab says that the grant involved a research project to “combine aspects of Nectome’s chemistry with the Boyden group’s invention, expansion microscopy, to better visualize mouse brain circuits for basic science and research purposes.” Apparently Prof. Boyden has “no personal affiliation — financial, operational, or contractual — with the company Nectome.”
The statement concludes with a discussion of the science behind Nectome. The Media Lab doesn’t completely rule out the possibility of brain preservation and uploading in the future, but it suggests that the science isn’t solid yet:
Neuroscience has not sufficiently advanced to the point where we know whether any brain preservation method is powerful enough to preserve all the different kinds of biomolecules related to memory and the mind. It is also not known whether it is possible to recreate a person’s consciousness.
McIntyre told the MIT Technology Review, “We appreciate the help MIT has given us, understand their choice, and wish them the best.”
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Here are some real things people said about brain preservation startup Nectome
Regular TechCrunch readers have probably noticed an uptick in Y Combinator-related profiles over the last few days, as founders rush to get press coverage before next week’s Demo Day. Today, the MIT Technology Review gave us the details of one of the most ambitious and science fictional-sounding ones yet. The startup in question is Nectome, which promises to preserve people’s… Read More
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Life sciences startup Avro aims to deliver drugs to children and the elderly through skin patches
Avro, a life sciences startup in Y Combinator’s current batch, is banking on a method to deliver medications to populations unable to swallow or chew — it will administer them through the skin. Starting with allergy medications, the startup is developing skin patches that release drugs commonly used in seasonal allergies for children. The patches can deliver a variety of drugs. Read More
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Human sequencing pioneer George Church wants to give you the power to sell your DNA on the blockchain
The blockchain is the buzziest thing on the internet these days and now MIT professor and godfather of the Human Genome Project George Church wants to put your genes on it. His new startup Nebula Genomics plans to sequence your genome for less than $1,000 and then add your data to the blockchain through the purchase of a “Nebula Token.” Read More
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