Blog

Category: Therapeutics

Editing out pesticides using CRISPR technology?

This summer, more than a million tons of chardonnay grapes are plumping on manicured vineyards around the world. The grapes make one of the most popular white wines, but their juicy fruit and luscious leaves are also targets for diseases such as downy mildew, a stubborn fungus-like parasite. If left unchecked, downy mildew coats grapes in white fuzz and strips the plant’s leaves, which means any surviving fruit won’t produce enough sugar to make good wine. Downy mildew is found practically anywhere wine grapes are grown, from California to Australia, New Zealand, South Africa[, and New Jersey].

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Since the market clamors for familiar varieties, New Jersey growers have been stuck with the vulnerable grapes, which require regular pesticide sprays for protection. But a new genetic tool called CRISPR may eventually offer an alternative: a chardonnay genetically edited to resist downy mildew.

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Personalized recommendation engines like Iora Health are coming to health care

In the past decade, consumers have shifted from worrying about sharing personal financial information when shopping on the internet to embracing online retailers’ recommendations for them.

Now, healthcare companies are experimenting with digital capabilities to see if they can encourage a similar level of influence in people’s lives. By doing so, they are testing the limits of the potential power of repurposing online retail innovations that consumers have become accustomed to in varied industries and potentially revamping healthcare in the process.

For example, digital technology company Omada Health helps individuals lose weight and prevent diabetes through online behavioral counseling. Iora Health attacks unnecessary care by pairing technology-powered patient analytics with high-touch, team-based care at its network of primary-care clinics.

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US HealthVest announces $50 Million in Series B round funding to expand behavioral and mental health coverage

US HealthVest (USHV), a developer and operator of behavioral health facilities, today announced it has secured $50 million in a Series B funding round. Oak HC/FT, a leading venture-growth equity fund investing in healthcare services technology companies, joins founding investors Polaris Partners, F-Prime Capital Partners and Richard A. Kresch, M.D. in this funding round to directly enable the company to further expand its coverage.

Bringing psychiatric and substance abuse care to underserved communities, USHV hospitals develop an array of specialized programs in response to community need and partner with existing medical providers to expand services and improve access to care.

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F-Prime Capital ranked #2 in top 100 biotech VCs

2015 proved to be the biggest year on record for venture investing in U.S. biotechs. A total of $7.7 billion flowed into a range of startups, some clustered in Boston/Cambridge and San Francisco, but with quite a large amount finding its way to drug developers off the beaten biotech path.

This year the money has continued to flow at the same torrid pace, even though the IPO window for drug developers has dropped down to an uncomfortable squeeze space for the hottest, or most desperate, companies to aim at.

But how do the VCs rank in terms of deals and dollars? I asked Thomson Reuters, which does the numbers for the MoneyTree Report from PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP and the National Venture Capital Association, and they came back with the list below.

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Stem cell factory opens door for trials of personalized diabetes treatment

In a step that could lead to a new diabetes treatment, several Boston-area hospitals have teamed up with the Harvard Stem Cell Institute and biotech Semma Therapeutics to make personalized cell-based therapies and organize clinical trials.

It is one of several initiatives around the country aimed at manufacturing cell-derived treatments, as the hope for such therapies creates a demand for the production of the cells.

In patients with type 1 diabetes, the immune system attacks the pancreatic cells that produce insulin, called beta cells. Doctors have for years transplanted beta cells from dead donors into patients, but the supply is insufficient for the millions of people with type 1 diabetes, and patients’ bodies sometimes reject the donor cells.

The new program, officially called the Boston Autologous Islet Replacement Program, could provide enough high-quality beta cells needed to treat patients in upcoming clinical trials. And the cells that will be transplanted into these volunteers will be derived from their own blood cells, cutting the risk of rejection.

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Iora Health named an innovator in primary care

There is an urgent need for innovation in primary care delivery — inadequate access for patients, poor care coordination, and a broken reimbursement system are well-documented challenges facing the field. Despite promising efforts and important pilots to overcome these obstacles, wide-spread innovation and improvement has been constrained by financing structures that incent the piecemeal, volume-driven delivery of clinical services rather than promoting care redesign. Amidst these prevailing reimbursement models, sources of funding for innovation in primary care delivery are limited.

In recent years, a handful of primary care leaders, dissatisfied with the pace of change, have approached the structure and financing of primary care transformation through a radically different model: for-profit, venture capital-funded enterprises. And many leading investors from the traditional health care spaces of biotech and pharmaceuticals—such as F-Prime Capital Partners, Maverick Capital, Polaris Ventures, and GV—have funded primary care service enterprises.

To better characterize this growing trend, we used publically available information to explore how three prominent innovators—Iora Health, One Medical Group, and Qliance Medical Management—are leveraging venture funding to support primary care redesign.

 

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Vermont to employ PatientPing to coordinate care

As part of the Vermont Health Care Innovation Project, the Green Mountain State has tapped Boston-based PatientPing for data exchange among its hospitals.

Vermont officials and healthcare professionals will announce the adoption of PatientPing across the state’s healthcare providers today at Vermont Blueprint for Health 2016 in Burlington.

The technology is expected to boost medical information transparency among previously disconnected healthcare providers.

“Our state has come together in this partnership to launch a progressive initiative dedicated to improving the way Vermonters receive care,” said Lawrence Miller, senior advisor and chief of healthcare reform at the Office of the Governor, in a news release.

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Acacia Pharma initiates second phase e treatment trial with BAREMSIS™, expects NDA filing in 2016

Acacia Pharma Group plc (“Acacia Pharma”), the supportive care company developing products for US and international markets, announces the initiation of its second pivotal Phase 3 treatment study, investigating BAREMSIS™ (amisulpride injection, formerly APD421) in surgical patients who develop post-operative nausea & vomiting (PONV), despite having received antiemetic prophylaxis before surgery.

International consensus guidelines recommend that surgical patients who develop PONV should be treated with an antiemetic with a different mechanism of action from any antiemetic given before surgery for the prevention of PONV. Currently two classes of antiemetics are predominantly given prophylactically in an attempt to prevent PONV. These are 5HT3 antagonists (usually ondansetron) and corticosteroids (usually dexamethasone). A safe and effective third antiemetic mechanism is therefore required to treat subsequent PONV and BAREMSIS, a dopamine antagonist antiemetic, could fulfil this need.

 

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VitalWare Completes Financing to Accelerate Growth of SaaS Solutions for Healthcare Providers

VitalWare™, a leading provider of revenue cycle SaaS solutions to healthcare organizations, announced today that it has received a growth investment from F-Prime Capital Partners (formerly Fidelity Biosciences), a global venture capital firm investing in healthcare and technology.

Since its founding in 2011, VitalWare has created and launched six SaaS products to build an intuitive suite of cloud-based Analytics, Documentation, Coding, Billing and Auditing technologies.  The backbone of this suite is the patent-pending, proprietary medical terminology engine, ICD Sherpa™, which guides physicians, clinical documentation staff and coders through the increased specificity requirements found in the new ICD-10 code set. VitalWare is the only vendor that provides a technology that enables consistent search results to all three of these major constituents. The Company was recently ranked #123 on the 2015 Inc. 500 list of the fastest-growing private companies in America.

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Baxalta and Precision BioSciences form Global Genome Editing Collaboration in Immuno-Oncology

Baxalta Incorporated (NYSE: BXLT), a global biopharmaceutical leader dedicated to delivering transformative therapies to patients with orphan diseases and underserved conditions, and Precision BioSciences, the genome editing company, today announced a global collaboration to develop a broad series of allogeneic chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cell therapies directed towards areas of major unmet need in multiple cancers.

 

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