Next Phase Newsletter

By Jessica Yang, Senior Research Analyst, Asia Business Development, LSN

Life Science Nation (LSN)’s 2-day Longevity, Health & Innovation (LHI) digital partnering conference took place March 18-19. We are very excited to announce the Top Winners of each Innovator’s Pitch Challenge (IPC) session. As the popularity grows for LHI IPC, we had three sessions featuring Therapeutics, Medical Devices & Diagnostics, and Digital Health companies. Attendees voted for their favorite companies based on materials available on the companies’ dedicated webpages, as well as their live pitch and Q&A.

Thank you to each IPC company for participating and sharing your technology and story with the LHI community. Congratulations to the winners, and thanks to all for voting!

Session 1 (Therapeutics) Tied Winners

APIE-Therapeutics, Inc is a preclinical stage biopharmaceutical company pioneering the endothelium vascular niche repair and regeneration platform. By harnessing activation of the Apelin-APJ receptor, we intend to improve patients’ lives suffering from chronic diseases such as Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis (IPF), KidneyMembranous Glomerulonephritis (MGN) & Chronic Kidney Disease (CKD), Scleroderma (SSc) and others.

Panaceutics Rx uses its patented technologies to enable easy access to affordable personalized medicine and wellness, offering unique combination forms to improve adherence, delivered direct to patients. Our mission is to enable personalized combination products for prevention and chronic therapy, with aids to formulation based on an individual’s digital health profile. Individualized, optimized combinations are enabled to be made on-demand using our robotic platforms and patented processes. Under 503A regulatory rules, Panaceutics automates the compounding of individualized therapies to match physician’s prescriptions. We deliver individualized combination therapies in consumer-friendly forms that promote adherence.

Session 2 (Digital Health) Winner

LifeBio is an age-tech company that captures individuals’ life stories and increases social connectedness— to enhance mental health and to improve Alzheimer’s care.

Session 3 (Medical Devices & Diagnostics) Winner

Eye movements offer a window into brain health. neuroFit licensed a NASA-developed oculometric technology co-invented by one of our founders that delivers eye-movement-based metrics, some well-known from physiology (e.g., latency, acceleration, gain) and other more modern sensorimotor metrics (e.g., direction noise, speed tuning) distilled into a summary metric, nFit. Compared to biomarkers from imaging and EEG, oculometric approaches require only a visual display and a well-designed tracking system to yield noninvasive, low-cost biomarkers that can be scaled on consumer devices.

If you’re interested in the next upcoming Innovator’s Pitch Challenge, you can apply for the Digital RESI IPC taking place June 8-10. Applications close May 14!

By Claire Jeong, Chief Conference Officer, Vice President of Investor Research, Asia BD, LSN

We have successfully finished off our 3-Day Redefining Early Stage Investments (RESI) March Conference. As with our previous events, we had the pleasure of featuring over 30 innovative startup companies across therapeutics, medical devices, diagnostics, and digital health sectors through the Innovator’s Pitch Challenge (IPC).

I am very excited to announce to Top 3 winners of this IPC. Conference attendees were able to vote for their favorite companies based on the information on their dedicated page on the Digital RESI March Live Agenda, featuring a short pitch video, slide deck, executive summary, and other materials available for conference attendees to view. This Top 3 win is indicative of not only their innovative technology, but also their ability to present this in a cogent manner. The Top 3 winners will receive free tickets to future RESI conferences to help with their fundraising efforts.

The RESI Team would like to thank every IPC company for their hard work in preparing for these virtual presentations. We hope to continue the IPC as a unique platform for innovators and investors to connect, and we look forward to meeting and highlighting other innovative companies at future conferences, like Digital RESI, June 8-10.

Please check out the Top 3 Winners below!

First Place: Thrive Bioscience

Thrive is commercializing a family of instruments and software that provide previously unavailable data, imaging, analytics, and automation for cell culture, stem cell culture, and tissue culture for use in biomedical research and cell therapeutics. Thrive has recently started selling the first two instruments in the family, the CellAssist and the CellAssist 50. Both collect 1,000’s of images of live cells in culture, analyzes them, provides guidance and builds a significant database. The CellAssist 50 enables researchers to automatically and remotely image 50 plates of cells on an ongoing basis, generating large amounts of data for live cell biology. Sites include Harvard Stem Cell Institute, Center for Genomic Medicine (Massachusetts General Hospital), Stanford Stem Cell Core, University of Texas Medical Branch, as well as large and small pharma/biotech companies.

Second Place: modality.ai

Modality addresses the urgent need for objective and accurate biomarkers in the development of therapies for neurological and psychiatric disorders (such as autism, Parkinson’s, depression, etc.) Modality uses multimodal conversational AI extracting speech and facial measures to quantify the progression of such disorders in drug trials remotely – leading to faster completion, lowering failure rates, and increasing the ROI of drug development. In another market, Modality is used for Remote Patient Monitoring providing accurate, repeated metrics about the disease state of a physician’s patient base.

Third Place: SleepSpace

Proactive Life Inc (DBA SleepSpace) is a NYC based company using a universal experience — sleeping — to optimize health and wellness.
A few bullet points below:

• $73B annual spending on sleep aids (1 in 3 American’s have a sleep disorder)
• SleepSpace™ goes beyond tracking to actually help people sleep better
• $3.4M booked revenues from NIH grants | $2.5M awarded in July 2020
• D2C freemium model: 2,000+ paid subscribers (78% at $29.99 annually)
• B2B paid contracts with Google & LIFX to build smart light sleep journeys
• FDA Approval underway to change how doctors do remote patient care
• Barriers to entry include AI algorithms and 4 utility patents (2 granted)
• All-star team of sleep scientists, technologists, and exited entrepreneurs
• $1M prior Angel round with Bascom Ventures, Lightspeed, Quake & UpVentures
• Opening $2M Seed round with 87% allocated to scale proven acquisition funnel