These 20 ‘Tech & Med’ startups make their pitches at Triangle Venture Day

RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK – Here are the company reps who lined up to make presentations, and brief notes about their significance at Thursday’s “Triangle Venture Day: Emerging Tech & Med:”

Altis BioSystems Presenter: Michael Biron

Currently, 88% of drugs that begin clinical trials fail to receive FDA approval and $212B is spent annually on R&D. One of the main reasons is inadequate drug testing methods using animals and in vitro models with cell lines, prior to clinical trials. Altis’ patented stem cell platform recreates normal human intestinal tissue, in a high throughput and scalable format, which more closely replicates native human biology for drug screening in the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries. The platform can be broadly utilized for efficacy, safety, and drug disposition and allows pharma companies to test on human tissue to develop more effective drugs, before entering expensive clinical trials, reducing cost and time due to failures. Altis primarily sells its platform by providing contract research services and is working with 13 of the top-20 pharma companies, in addition to small and medium size companies.

Assure Presenter: Stephen Eckel

Assure Technologies, LLC wants to reduce medication errors and keep patients safe throughout their health care journey. It accomplishes this through developing better products and solutions to the preparation and administration of intravenous medications. Its simple, easy-to-use medical device called Precynge ensures precise and accurate measurement for pediatrics. Precynge combines the simplicity and usability of a volumetric medication delivery tool with the sensitivity of an advanced microprocessor to quickly aid health care personnel in preparing medications.

Continuous Precision Medicine Presenter: Steven Walther

Continuous Precision Medicine is an early-stage digital health company based in Research Triangle Park, dedicated to improving health and wellbeing with personalized solutions for controlled medication through its innovative and novel precision prescribing technology.

CoupletCare Presenters: Stacie McEntyre; Kristin Patricia Tully

Couplet Care, LLC offers tools for improving patient safety and clinical efficiency, while promoting positive mother and infant health outcomes. Our first product, a postnatal unit medical infant bassinet is a University of North Carolina spinout, 510(k) Exempt, Class II Medical Device, with a US Patent, exclusive IP, strong interest from hospitals, and is in 4th generation prototype post-DFM design lock. The Couplet Care Bassinet uniquely allows the mom to independently access the infant.

DNAli Data Technologies Inc. Presenter: Kyle Tomek

DNALI is an early-stage startup company based on IP developed at NC State. DNALI’s suite of technologies forms a platform capable of encoding, synthesizing, storing, managing, reading, and decoding DNA. Short-term use cases include DNA data storage software packages, DNA and gene synthesis, product tracking and authentication, and clandestine data transport. Our long-term mission is to revolutionize the digital data storage market by harnessing the incredible density, durability, and longevity of DNA to reduce the construction, maintenance, resource, and energy costs of data storage facilities by several orders of magnitude. DNALI is currently seeking strategic partnerships, pilot customers, and funding for product development.

Fauna Labs Presenter: Dave Haas

FaunaLabs was started in 2021 with a mission to monitor pet health using technologies like those found in human health wearables. However, optical health sensors used in human wearables don’t work on animals with hair or fur. We invented an optical health sensor that does. This category-defining capability, integrated into our always-connected, GPS-enabled device, makes it the must-have smart collar for any pet owner who wants the keep track of the health and location of their beloved family member.

Ideal Medical Technologies Presenter: Steven Kane

Ideal Medical Technologies, (incorporated in Delaware 2014), is a highly innovative medical-device company focused on the development and sale of an artificial pancreas system for use in both the ICU and general ward settings. IMT’s primary product, currently in the development stage, is FUSION. FUSION is a new artificial intelligence-driven, fully autonomous, closed-loop system, to adjust and improve glucose control for extremely sick, unstable, and recovering ICU & diabetic patients. It is the culmination of nearly 15 years of research and development and has been granted Breakthrough Medical Device status by the United States Food and Drug Administration. FUSION is currently undergoing clinical trials at Emory University.

inSoma Bio Presenter: Stefan Roberts

inSoma Bio is striving to build breast implants, personalized lumpectomy molds, and repair other soft tissue defects using a person’s own tissue without the need for major reconstructive surgery. To do this, we have developed an injectable gel that allows plastic surgeons to reliably build new tissue using a patient’s own fat. We have inspiring efficacy data coupled with a substantially de-risked safety profile guiding us to the next stages of company and product development. We are raising capital to drive us through our first-in-human clinical trials, a key value inflection point for partnerships that also opens up platform use of our developing suite of products.

IrNex Presenter: Hsing Lee

IrNex, Inc. is a UNC startup company, formed in August, 2020, by Qiuhong He, Ph.D., (inventor of the pi-MRSI methods at UNC-CH and four other U.S. patents at the University of Pittsburgh); Hsing Lee, Ph.D., (expertise in commercial software development), and Han H. Liu (experience in medical device companies and FDA regulatory matters). The company is developing biomarker imaging software for early detection of cancer-treatment responses in days rather than months. It enables differentiation of pseudo-progression from true tumor progression following brain tumor/metastasis treatment.

Mente Presenter: Wes Hill; Ian Hill

Mente tracks surgical instrument use, capturing a data stream that records how surgery is performed to enable predictability, drive efficiency, and increase safety in the OR. Their first product provides perioperative customers with $100k in annual savings per OR by enabling data-driven management of their surgical instruments. With technology originally developed at Duke University, the team is now raising a seed round that will enable it to scale to new customers.

Mizar Therapeutics Presenter: Paul Maddox

Mizar Therapeutics applies transformative live cell imaging technology to accelerate lead validation in drug discovery. Built on proven, patented methodologies, MizarTx uses neural network analysis of single-molecule dynamics to identify superior CAR-T cell clones for immunotherapy and to track condensate-targeted small molecules in several disease domains. Small-molecule behaviors such as diffusion, binding dynamics, and trafficking are predictive of both positive and negative responses and thereby enable early detection of false positive and negative hits and superior lead identification.

OnDa Vision Technologies Presenter: William (Bill) Reynolds

Onda Vision Technologies, Inc originated as an Internet of Things company focused on developing and commercializing advanced analytics for wearable sensors. The Raleigh firm is a spinout from NC State’s Advanced Self-Powered Systems Integrated Sensors and Technologies (ASSIST) Center. Onda Vision serves people who experience shifts in their hydration levels induced by exertion, mission, or medical conditions. We are developing a wearable hydration system based on bioimpedance to monitor the body’s fluid compartments. Our system predicts the onset of severe hydration changes and sends early alerts to prevent adverse health outcomes. Onda Vision was founded to see beyond what is visible to manifest the uniqueness within each individual.

SonoVascular Presenter: Dan Estay

SonoVascular is developing a novel, catheter-enabled, multi-mechanism SonoThrombectomy system using microbubble-mediated cavitation as the core mechanism of action to treat all types of blood clots more effectively, without the increased risk of bleeding, by uniquely combining multiple mechanisms of action delivered through an integrated intravascular catheter system. SonoVascular’s technology has been engineered to address and overcome the deficiencies and limitations of current devices across the broadest range of indications. Its design enables the safe and effective treatment of all types of blood clots, particularly subacute and chronic clots, while significantly reducing the amount of thrombolytics.

SonoVoice Presenter: Sandeep Bhatt

SonoVoice, Inc. is a Raleigh startup commercializing patent-pending digital voice training technology developed at Duke and NC State Universities. The SonoVoice system – including a digital device and smartphone app – offers an accessible voice-training platform to optimize voice production using proven exercises, vocal function data and original educational content. Some 45 million Americans – including teachers, entertainers, members of the clergy and singers – place significant demands on their voices for personal or professional wellbeing. One in 13 Americans experience voice problems annually, most often resulting from voice overuse or inefficient voice use. SonoVoice offers these “vocal athletes” a proactive and systematic training platform to avoid vocal injury and achieve vocal fitness.

SplendoHealth Presenter: Eric Sanchez

SplendoHealth – CRF for fitness, health and performance.  Cardiorespiratory Function (CRF) is the most underutilized assessment of how the heart, lungs and muscle use oxygen under stress or strain. Existing assessments require physicians, trained technicians and in-hospital equipment. SplendoHealth’s AI and mobile app integrate data from select wearable technologies to provide remote medical-grade CRF assessments outside of a hospital setting. Individuals and patients could use it at their local clinic, or athletes at training facilities, with the eventual goal to provide CRF assessments for anyone at their local pharmacies or at home. Expanding the opportunity for anyone to obtain medical-grade CRF assessment for better fitness, health and performance.

Synchrohealth   Presenters: John Batsis; Suehayla Mohieldin

SynchroHealth, LLC is an early-stage small business co-founded by faculty and students from UNC and Dartmouth College. Our mission is to develop hardware and software solutions for non-invasive detection and acquisition of home-based longitudinal healthcare data using remote Bluetooth low-energy-enabled technologies for synchronous and asynchronous feedback. We have a team with expertise in aging, data and computer science, and business development that will help us achieve our goals. Our first product, BandPass, is a remote-sensing BLE resistance exercise band that closes the gap between clinicians and patients by providing clinically relevant data on compliance and use of exercise training and real-time, bi-directional feedback enabling at-home physical therapy.

Mobile Mass Spectrometry Presenter: Kathleen (Kat) Horvath, Ph.D.

We have developed a mobile mass spectrometer for the simultaneous detection of a wide range of environmental pollutants and contaminants in real-time. Our laboratory-prototype mobile mass spectrometer provides both highly sensitive and precise data by incorporating three core technologies: aperture coding, a cycloidal mass analyzer, and an array detector. We are developing our next field-deployable prototype instrument with improved sensitivity, size, and robustness. We will demonstrate the mobile mass spectrometer’s unique field capabilities within our beachhead market of detecting the source of underground leaks using chemical tracer molecules.

Ummino Presenter Jose Bruno-Barcena

Ummino is focused on meeting the sharp rise in consumer demand for fortified food & beverage products responsible for driving growth in the functional food ingredient market to an estimated $137.1 billion by 2026. Our patented precision fermentation technology unlocks compounds that are rare in nature to optimize taste & nutrition and transform commodity ingredients into high-value functional foods.

URO-1 Presenter: Ted Belleza

URO-1 is poised to introduce a suite of five products that will improve the diagnostic accuracy of prostate biopsy, increase efficiency in both the urology clinic and the pathology lab, and likely change the standard of care. Two of these products have been cleared to market by the FDA and validated in clinical studies. The company is seeking financing to execute a limited market introduction in urology to gain traction with select paying users, before expanding sales with a strategic partner in urology and other potential cancer markets.

Vetletics Presenter: Irina Perdew

We at Vetletics are a group of veterinarians, scientists and entrepreneurs with a passion for the progression in animal health local to North Carolina. For our first product we have modified proven technology used by human athletes and doctors, and developed the world’s first dynamic compression device for horses – the EQ Press. We have first unit sales and are building a repeatable and scalable business model

The post These 20 ‘Tech & Med’ startups make their pitches at Triangle Venture Day first appeared on WRAL TechWire.

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