Predictably, the amount of investment in predictive analytics devoted to clinical applications eclipses patient-focused companies. It’d understandable since most of them are tied to helping payers and providers make decisions about patient care. Which patients are at greatest risk for developing diabetes? What does someone’s credit score say about their likelihood of being hospitalized? So which companies are developing predictive analytics tools for patients? A new Rock Health report highlights them.
Quanttus is developing wearables to track data that contributes to hypertension and cardiac disease so people have a better understanding of what they need to do to steer themselves away from contracting these conditions. A wearable component will gather the data and an application will create insights drawn from the data to help people make better decisions about their health. It raised $22 million earlier this year from Khosla Ventures, Vinod Khosla and Matrix Partners.
BigHealth claims to create personalized behavioral health medicine delivered through smartphone and Web-based apps. First up is Sleepio, a mobile health app designed to treat sleep disorders. It claims to have done the first placebo-controlled randomized control trial for a digital sleep intervention. It received funding from Forward Partners and Index Ventures earlier this year.
GenePeeks analyzes the genetic profiles of women with potential sperm donors to determine whether the child would be at risk for any particular recessive conditions. As is often the case with healthcare startups, the company was developed because of a personal experience of CEO and founder Ann Morriss that she wants to help others avoid. She discovered she was a silent carrier for a condition called MCADD deficiency. Unfortunately, so was the sperm donor she and her partner chose five years ago when planning for their first child. The child, Alex, now has a rare and potentially fatal genetic disorder that prevents the body from converting certain fats into energy. Earlier this year it received a $3 million venture loan from Horizon Technology Finance.
Inside Tracker For a personal nutrition model, this company goes deep. It’s the first I have come across that uses biomarkers to develop a personal diet regime to improve fitness and performance. A blood biomarker analysis spits out nutritional recommendations based on biomarkers like glucose and vitamin D. It gives a break down of people’s baseline levels and how to improve them. The company that developed the technology, Segterra, attracted investment from Mass Ventures and Henry Kauftheil.
Sproutling uses a band around an infant’s foot to track heart rate, skin temperature and movement, while also tracking environmental factors such as the room’s humidity and light levels. It has been collaborating with Xerox Parc researchers to develop a new statistical model to lead parents to actionable advice. The wearables startup went through the incubator Lemnos Labs and last year raised $2.6 million from First Round Capital, Forerunner Ventures, FirstMark Capital, Accelerator Ventures, and David Tisch of BoxGroup, among others.
23andMe has a direct to consumer personal genome service that uses a spit test to assess users’ risk profile for inherited diseases and projected response to drug therapies. The company was snarled in a dispute with the FDA since receiving a warning letter calling for the company to stop marketing its personal genome service. It worked out a compromise to focus on DNA profiles and ancestry. Earlier this year the company submitted to the FDA for approval a health report for Bloom’s disease. This month it inked a strategic partnerhsip with My Heritage, an Israeli family history business
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
Update: I couldn’t make out 23andMe because font was tiny, so I have added them
