medicine

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Keeps parent company Thirty Madison raises $15 million to fight male pattern baldness

Thirty Madison, the healthcare startup behind the hair loss brand Keeps, has brought in a $15.25 million Series A co-led by Maveron and Northzone.

The company provides a subscription-based online marketplace for men’s hair loss prevention medications Finasteride and Minoxidil. Keeps sells these drugs direct-to-consumer, working with manufacturers to keep the costs low.

On Keeps, a subscription of Minoxidil, an over-the-counter topical treatment often referred to by the brand name Rogaine, is $10 monthly. A subscription to Finasteride, a prescription drug taken daily, is $25 per month.

It’s an end-to-end platform that is the single best place for guys who are looking to keep their hair,” Thirty Madison co-founder Steven Gutentag told TechCrunch.

Keeps is tapping into a big market. According to the American Hair Loss Association, two-thirds of American men experience some hair loss by the age of 35.

You may have heard of Hims, a venture-backed men’s healthcare company that similarly sells subscriptions to hair loss treatments, as well as oral care, skin care and treatments for erectile dysfunction. Keeps is its smaller competitor. For now, the company is focused solely on haircare, though with the new funds, Thirty Madison plans to launch Cove, a sister brand to Keeps that will provide treatments to migraine sufferers.

The company was founded last year by Gutentag and Demetri Karagas with a plan to develop several digital healthcare brands under the Thirty Madison umbrella.

“Going through this process myself of starting to experience hair loss, I was not sure where to turn,” Gutentag said. “I went online and looked up ‘why am I losing my hair,’ and if you search on Google, really for any medical condition, you usually walk away thinking you’re going to die … I was so fortunate that I got access to this high-quality specialist who could help me with my problem and I was in the position to afford those treatments, but most people don’t get that access.”

Keeps also provide digital access to a network of doctors at a cost of roughly $30 per visit.

TechCrunch’s Connie Loizos wrote last year that “it’s never been a better time to be a man who privately suffers from erectile dysfunction, premature ejaculation or hair loss” because of advances and investments in telemedicine. Since then, even more money has been funneled into the space.

Hims has raised nearly $100 million to date and is rumored to be working on a line of women’s products. Roman, a cloud pharmacy for erectile dysfunction, raised an $88 million Series A last month and is launching a “quit smoking kit.” And Lemonaid Health, which also provides prescriptions to erectile dysfunction medications and more, secured $11 million last year.

Greycroft, Steadfast Venture Capital, First Round, ERA, HillCour and Two River also participated in Thirty Madison’s fundraise, which brings its total raised to date to $22.75 million.

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The FDA OK’d an app as a form of birth control

Don’t want to get pregnant? There’s a Food and Drug Administration approved app for that. The FDA has just given the go ahead for Swedish app Natural Cycles to market itself as a form of birth control in the U.S.

Natural Cycles was already in use as a way to prevent pregnancy in certain European countries. However, this is the first time a so-called ‘digital contraceptive’ has been approved in America.

The app works using an algorithm based on data given by women using the app such as daily body temperature and monthly menstrual cycles. It then calculates the exact window of days each month a woman is most fertile and therefore likely to conceive. Women can then see which days the app recommends they should avoid having sex or use protection to avoid getting pregnant.

Tracking your cycle to determine a fertile window has long been used to either become pregnant or avoid conceiving. But Natural Cycles put a scientific spin on it by evaluating over 15,000 women to determine its algorithm had an effectiveness rate with a margin of error of 1.8 percent for “perfect use” and a 6 percent failure rate for “typical use.”

What that means is almost two in every 100 women could likely conceive on a different date than the calculated fertile window. That’s not exactly fool-proof but it is higher than many other contraceptive methods. A condom, for instance, has an 18 percent margin of error rate, according to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC).

And though the app makers were able to convince the FDA of its effectiveness, at least one hospital in Stockholm has opened an investigation with Sweden’s Medical Products Agency (MPA) after it recorded 37 unwanted pregnancies among women who said they had been using the app as their contraception method.

“Consumers are increasingly using digital health technologies to inform their everyday health decisions, and this new app can provide an effective method of contraception if it’s used carefully and correctly,” assistant director for the health of women in the FDA’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health Terri Cornelison said in a statement.

However, she also acknowledged there was a margin of error in the app’s algorithm and other contraceptive methods. “Women should know that no form of contraception works perfectly, so an unplanned pregnancy could still result from correct usage of this device,” she said.

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Massage-on-demand company, Soothe, raises $31 million

The massage-on-demand service Soothe seems to be rubbing investors the right way with the close of a new $31 million round of funding.

The Series C round from late-stage and growth capital investment firm, The Riverside Company, caps a busy first quarter for the massage service. It also relocated from Los Angeles to Las Vegas; named a new chief executive; and announced new geographies where its massage booking platform is now available. 

As part of the new round, chief executive and founder Merlin Kauffman is stepping down from the role and assuming the mantle of executive chairman. Current chief financial officer Simon Heyrick is stepping into the chief executive role.

The former CFO of MarketShare, Heyrick has helped the company expand to more than 11,000 massage therapists in its network.

The company said the new round would help keep massage therapists in its network with pricing that can be up to three times more than those therapists would make in their local markets.

Beyond the new financing and a new boss, Soothe also is heading to new markets, launching services in Manchester, U.K.; Australia’s Gold Coast, Pittsburgh and Hartford, Conn. (some of those places are not like the others).

Soothe isn’t the only player in the massage marketplace. New York-based Zeel also has an offering for folks who want to book massages on the fly. Zeel claims a geographic reach of 85 U.S. cities, while Soothe claims roughly 60 cities worldwide.

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Study: Seasons have little effect on dieting app reporting but the day of week does

 If you’ve gotten three apps and a Fitbit so you can get skinnier this year, don’t worry so much about summer beach season or holiday weight gain. Instead, worry about Thursday. Researchers at University of South Carolina found that self-reporting of food was integral to weight loss but that self-reporters often fell off, seemingly around the holidays. “A key question we wanted… Read More

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Roman is a cloud pharmacy for erectile dysfunction

 “When I was 17, I experienced erectile dysfunction.” My interviews with startup founders rarely start so candidly. But to destigmatize the business of his new company, Roman, and empathize with customers, Zachariah Reitano is getting vulnerable. “I think in a good way I’ve become numb to the embarrassment,” says 26-year-old Reitano. Read More

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“Self-regulating” nanoparticles can burn cancer without harming healthy cells

 Researchers at the University of Surrey and Dalian University of Technology in China have created a form of nanoparticle that can heat up and kill cancerous cells and then self-regulate to avoid burning healthy cells. The particles can raise their temperature between 42°C to 45°C, hot enough to kill cancer cells. Once they reach a set temperature they back off, ensuring that healthy cells… Read More

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Ourotech is taking the guesswork out of cancer treatment

 Every day spent with late stage cancer matters — that’s why it’s so important to get treatments right the first time. Unfortunately, despite having dozens of cancer treatments available, we don’t have great processes for determining what treatments to prioritize. The consequence of this is that we often miscalculate and waste critical time pursuing the wrong path.… Read More

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Figure 1, a knowledge-sharing app for doctors, launches sponsored content

 Since its launch in 2013, Figure 1, a photo- and knowledge-sharing app for medical professionals, has focused on “traction” that is winning over new users and keeping them around. The app now boasts registered users in 190 countries, with three-quarters of U.S. med students using Figure 1. Today, the Toronto- and New York-based startup revealed how it has begun to generate revenue. Read More

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These jolly, candy-colored 3D-printed livers help doctors treat tumors

 The liver is a wonderful thing. It goes great on crackers and it can keep your blood from becoming septic. But it’s almost impossible to operate on that strange, fleshy mass without a little luck and a lot of preparation. Luckily there’s now a better way to prepare. For the past few months a medical student at the Jagiellonian University Medical College in Krakow, Poland, Jan… Read More

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Grail is raising at least $1 billion to fund its early cancer screening test

Arteriosclerosis, blood vessel The early cancer screening startup Grail plans to raise more than $1 billion in Series B financing today, possibly up to $1.8 billion. While the company doesn’t want to name investor names, only mentioning in a release the funding will come “primarily from undisclosed private and strategic investors,” Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Google… Read More

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