CHF 40,000 for a first-in-class treatment eliminating endometriosis tissue, lab-grade self-tests, and accessible portable ultrasound machines
20.01.2022
FimmCyte, Hemetron, and SighIn Health win Venture Kick's second financial and entrepreneurial support stage. Their projects give women back control of their bodies, help improve people's health by introducing a new technology that will lead to a telemedical revolution, and make portable ultrasound machines more accessible.
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 FimmCyte Founder Valentina Vongrad and CMO Maureen Cronin
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 Hemetron's Team from left to right: Alex Tanno, CEO and Co-founder Vlastimil Jirasko, Head Assay Development and Co-founder Yves Blickenstorfer, CTO and Co-founder
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 SightIn Health CEO William King, CMO Mehdi Namdar, Chief of AI Pablo Castellanos, CPO Marius Jatautas, and Head Applied Science Andreu Arderiu
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FimmCyte: first-in-class treatment for advanced-stage endometriosis
One in 10 women suffers from Endometriosis: a painful, chronic, infertility-causing, and recurrent disease. Endometriosis has a physical health burden comparable to cancer, yet only one new treatment was approved for it in the past decade. An unacceptable state given the inadequacy of current treatments which are only palliative, with countless side effects. Endometriosis burden reverberates through the healthcare system, economy, and society with millions of women suffering and billions of direct and indirect costs.
To address this unmet medical need, FimmCyte engineered a first-in-class treatment that has shown efficacy in eliminating endometriosis tissue in the lab and animal models which we aim to bring to the clinic in the next few years and give women back control of their bodies. FimmCyte team is composed of Co-founders Valentina Vongrad, Ph.D. with 12+ years experience in immunology, gene therapy, oncology; and CMO Maureen Cronin, MD-PhD with 20+ years in the industry, ex-VP Bayer & Vifor, medical advisor, Brigitte Leeners, Prof Dr.Head of the Department of Reproductive Endocrinology at the USZ. This novel class of treatments directly destroys the diseased tissue giving direct relief. The treatment is safe by design, only initiating the immune response against endometriosis after multiple layers of safety mechanisms to ensure high safety and efficacy. This non-hormonal treatment shall overcome the current limitations of hormonal therapies by being applicable to resistant tissues and supplement/replace surgeries in advanced cases.
The 40K from the Venture Kick phase II will be used for R&D, IP expansion, and regulatory strategy.
When you last had a fever, a cough, or other infection symptoms, how did you decide whether you should visit a doctor or not? In fact, there is no standardized system to inform this decision. Therefore, severe bacterial infections are not recognized early enough. By the time patients develop severe symptoms, antibiotic treatments already deliver sub-optimal outcomes, leading to 20% of the total mortality and one of the most expensive medical conditions.
Hemetron's breakthrough hand-held rapid test platform allows laboratory-grade blood tests directly at the patient's home. The platform combines the best of two worlds: the ease of use and mobility of rapid tests and the accuracy of laboratory tests. This unique combination makes Hemetron's platform the perfect test for telemedicine. The test allows telemedical doctors to diagnose bacterial infections at an early stage and thus enable effective antibiotic treatments and help save millions of lives.
Within the next 10 years, they foresee that the majority of doctor visits will no longer be centralized doctor visits, but remote telemedical consultations instead. Their home test platform will enable this telemedical revolution and therefore allow access to better healthcare for more people at lower cost.
The Venture Kick funding will help them to setup an online market research campaign and to upgrade their prototyping capabilities. hemetron.com
SightIn Health: Making portable ultrasound machines more accessible
Ultrasound hardware that cost in the past $100ks, now cost $1ks. MedTech hardware manufacturers like Philips, Butterfly, and Clarius have commoditized ultrasound with pocket-size units that plug straight into an iPhone. These units were built for general practitioners, nurses, primary care physicians. The problem is that these professionals have no training that normally takes more than 4 years to reliably use an ultrasound machine. Even further, trained sonography experts vary significantly from the repeatable analysis of machines. Therefore, there is a need to remove the knowledge barrier.
SightIn Health is an AI-SaaS company in the Digital Health space that enables superior use and interpretation of portable ultrasound machines. the team is composed of CEO William King IV, CPO Marius Jatautas, master's degree from EPFL in management of technologies, AI Tech Lead Pablo Cañas Castellanos, AI Specialist Andreu Arderiu, Double BSc in Math and Physics, and MSc in Statistics at EPFL. Their proprietary AI engine automatically performs quality assessment, ultrasound probe guidance, and image analysis. SightIn Health software lowers the necessary skill barrier required to use ultrasound equipment and
capture the highest-quality medical imaging and interpretation for patient diagnostics and prognostics. As a result, ultrasound will become a truly democratized, ubiquitous, and hyper-reliable medical imaging procedure. They have access to 10,000 ultrasound scans from HUG. Their TAM is estimated at USD 113 billion, their SAM at USD 42 billion, and the target market USD 23 billion.
The Venture Kick funds will be used for product development and commercial refinement.