Start-Up Previews, November 2013
Executive Summary
This Month's Profile Group: Heightened Concussion Awareness Calls For New Detection Tools, features profiles of Cerora, MC10, Oculogica, and Sway Medical. Plus these Start-Ups Across Health Care: Bicycle Therapeutics, Crosstrees Medical, Rescue Therapeutics, and Sensulin.
Heightened Concussion Awareness Calls For New Detection Tools
Medical device start-ups are surging into new territory in mild traumatic brain injury or concussion detection, which has heretofore lacked objective diagnostics and monitoring tools.
Cerora Inc. has developed a concussion assessment platform that will collect and analyze many different types of inputs: EEG data, eye gaze measurements, and measures of cognition and voice analysis, to detect concussions. By doing so, the company thinks it will be able to provide a more comprehensive picture of brain injury than competitors whose technologies assess a single factor.
MC10 Inc.’s wearable Biostamp, an extremely thin sensing patch akin to an artificial tattoo, has myriad applications in consumer and medical device markets. The start-up’s first product, launched in collaboration with Reebok International, is the CheckLight for detecting potential concussions in athletes who participate in contact sports.
Because there is a strong correlation between eye movement and brain activity, tracking those movements to determine the extent of a brain injury would appear to be a “no-brainer,” but there are few companies developing such technologies. One is Oculogica Inc., whose EyeBox system is designed to have the ability to detect and quantify the extent of brain injury, regardless of whether that injury is structurally visible by conventional radiology.
[Sway Medical LLC] hopes to bring an objective and inexpensive tool for the assessment of concussions to the playing field. Its Sway Balance system combines the hardware that is built into every iPhone with Sway’s proprietary software to assess players’ balance – a well-accepted measure for diagnosing concussion and measuring recovery from concussion – from the sidelines.
Start-Ups Across Health Care
Natural peptides have plenty of drawbacks that have held them back when it comes to pharmaceutical applications: their highly unstable amino acid chains degrade too quickly to produce a therapeutic effect, discovery has been difficult to industrialize, and manufacturing complex and costly. However, emerging technologies for synthetically stabilizing peptide structures may eventually conquer most of natural peptides’ drawbacks as pharmaceuticals. Bicycle Therapeutics Ltd. hopes its two-wheel “constrained” peptides it calls “bicycles” will ride off with the prize for exploiting nature’s medicines.
Forget about inflating balloons to treat vertebral fractures: the PVAPodSystem from [Crosstrees Medical Inc.] is a woven-fabric container that is positioned in the spine, and enables orthopedic surgeons or interventional radiologists to precisely control delivery of cement while reducing the threat of cement leakage.
The founders of [Rescue Therapeutics Inc.] believe they have created a compound that can boost the power of widely used generic cancer drugs, including doxorubicin, without exposing a patient to any additional toxicity. Although RTI’s work with the compound was initially geared to testing it against non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, the start-up is taking it forward as a potential second-line treatment for ovarian cancer.
Sensulin LLC aims to treat diabetes by linking a liposome-encapsulated form of recombinant human insulin with a boronic-acid derivative that is a competitive binder with glucose. If the drug works as envisioned, it would reduce the risk of hypoglycemia that can occur when glucose levels fluctuate during the day, and would also obviate the need for multiple injections and constant monitoring.