CHF 40,000 for startups developing oral microbiome therapies to treat chronic kidney disease and solutions to monitor asthma
24.11.2020
REN therapeutics and Resmonics win Venture Kick's second stage of financial and entrepreneurial support. Their projects prevent the progression of chronic kidney disease without the contraindications of current treatments and help patients monitor their asthma at night and prevent attacks.
 REN Therapeutics' CEO and founder Rikke C. Nielsen
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REN Therapeutics: Oral microbiome therapies to treat chronic kidney disease.
World-wide more than 800 million patients are suffering from chronic kidney disease (CDK). The disease causes a decline in kidney function that may ultimately result in the need for dialysis and kidney transplant. REN Therapeutics founded by CEO Rikke C Nielsen, with Nils Hijlkema as Outsourcing and Operations Manager, is a spin-out of BEO Therapeutics that has an academic link to ETHZ and that develops microbiome treatments counteract diseases caused by modern lifestyle. REN Therapeutics first product is a drug that will prevent the progression of CDK without the contraindications of current treatments. The innovation lies in the combination of two or more novel live bacteria that are selected for their effect on uremic toxins. The bacteria have in vitro shown to increase degradation of uremic toxin with 600% and inhibit the production of toxin with up to 100%. The financing from Venture Kick will be used be used to consolidate the business case including a better understanding of the chronic kidney disease area, the active players in the field and the financial plan, and later to progress the research to obtain pre-clinical data from a rat model.
Resmonics: AI-based digital biomarkers for respiratory diseases
Most patients do not monitor their asthma—simply because today's methods are too inconvenient. Without monitoring, however, patients often respond too late to symptom deteriorations: Every year, Swiss health insurances pay CHF 38 million for preventable emergency treatment. Asthma Guardian's mission is to reduce emergency care for asthma patients by offering the world's most convenient asthma warning system. The startup uses deep learning to leverage the smartphone's sensors to automatically monitor a patient's asthma at night. Through early warnings, Asthma Guardian gives patients a window of opportunity to increase their medication dosage in time, thereby preventing life-threatening and costly asthma attacks. The Venture Kick funding will be used to systematically explore customer needs and obtain regulatory counseling.