MedCitizens

StartUPDATES: New developments from healthcare startups

Check out new developments from Alto Neuroscience, Aptus Life, Elion, Lumata Health, and Sound Life Sciences.

Aptus Life, a virtual hub that connects patients and providers with RPM and CCM, will be transitioning its focus from diabetes to general healthcare. This change will make its platform in higher demand by giving more providers access to the hub. The telehealth company’s software provides a no-cost, all-in-one solution to improve the connection between all healthcare stakeholders.

With the digital cloud, providers can manage a patient’s entire healthcare process. Conduct onboarding, monitor patients 24/7, oversee billing and reconciliation, and more.

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Lumata Health is a health tech startup seeking to prevent blindness and focus on ophthalmology staffing challenges. Its intelligent eye care management platform has raised $4 million in the Series A round to scale in the U.S. Cortado Ventures led the funding round with participation by the Wolfpack Investor Network and 30 practicing ophthalmologists in the U.S..

More than 90% of vision loss caused by chronic conditions such as diabetic retinopathy, macular degeneration, glaucoma, and dry eye is preventable, but these conditions are leading causes of blindness in the US and abroad, according to a company press release.

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Precision psychiatry company Alto Neuroscience has closed a $35 million Series B round led by Lightswitch Capital, partners of Alkeon Capital, with participation from new investors such as Sobrato Capital, Novartis Pharma AG, Valor Equity Partners, Korify Capital, Vine Ventures, and Gaingels. Existng investors also took part in the funding round including Apeiron Group, WhatIf Ventures, Windham Venture Partners, and more.

The company uses biomarkers and an AI-enabled platform to develop precision medicine for conditions affecting cognition, emotion and sleep, such as depression and PTSD. It identifies biomarkers by evaluating brain function measures such as EEG and computerized tests of behavior and wearables, according to Alto’s website.

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Elion has raised a $3.3 million seed funding round. Among the investors taking part in the funding round are NEA, Max Ventures, 8VC, AlleyCorp, Charge Ventures and Floating Point. Additional investment came from healthcare founders and angel investors.

The goal of the healthcare startup is to make the task of vetting health tech vendors easier, according to a company press release.

“Through my experiences building at both Oscar Health and TrialSpark, I had first-hand exposure to the pain of trying to find and evaluate quality vendors,” said Bobby Guelich, CEO and co-founder at Elion. “It’s hard to figure out which vendors are out there, their websites don’t say what they actually do, and it takes multiple calls to get the information you need…Elion cuts through the noise. We make it simple to find and compare the vendors that are relevant to your needs, and ultimately make faster and better decisions.”

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Google has acquired a digital therapeutics startup designed to detect changes in breathing to improve chronic condition management and to prevent life-threatening emergencies, according to a news report in GeekWire. Although Google confirmed the acquisition of Sound Life Sciences, details of the deal were not disclosed, the article said.

Last year, the University of Washington spinout, founded in 2018, received 510(k) clearance for its breathing assessment tool for patients with chronic respiratory pulmonary disease, asthma, congestive heart failure and anxiety. It can use a smartphone app or smartspeaker app producing ultrasonic sonar pulses to detect reflections caused by nearby patient respiration.

Chief medical officer and Co-founder Dr. Jacob Sunshine said in a company press release at the time that this milestone was just the beginning of the company’s ambitions in healthcare.

“With this foundational clearance we have established a regulatory foothold, from which we can build out additional use cases including for respiratory chronic disease management such as asthma and COPD, opioid safety monitoring, infant monitoring, incipient respiratory infection detection and identifying when an unwitnessed cardiac arrest occurs. There are many clinical conditions you can point this at and we are laser focused on conditions where detecting aberrant breathing can lead to an evidence-based intervention and clearly provide value.”

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Photo: phive2015, Getty Images