PureTech, which has put itself squarely at the intersection of med tech and digital health innovation, has raised $55 million in a growth stage investment round, according to a company statement. It also added three senior partners from MIT and Harvard Medical School.
It received the new funding with participation from Invesco Perpetual to push ahead its pipeline of digital health and medical devices.
It launched Knode, in 2012. The search engine aggregates data from journals, patents and clinical trials and spits out that information for users searching for experts in any one discipline or condition. A search for Parkinson’s disease, for example, produces more than 25,000 hits with scientists listed in order of the number of papers they’ve written, the grant money received, patents owned and clinical trials they’ve done.
But it also has a large group of technology that combines pharma, digital and medical device technology. Gelesis is developing a smart pill that is treating obesity and diabetes and is taken like a drug but acts mechanically, so it would be regulated like a medical device. Akili Interactive Labs, which is working on a way to use gaming to remotely diagnose and treat cognitive disorders like ADHD and Alzheimer’s disease. Akili currently has 10 clinical studies underway, according to an emailed statement from PureTech Ventures Founder Daphne Zohar. She added that it will soon be analyzing the data from the first couple of studies. For a more detailed interview with Zohar, check out this link.
The senior partner additions include:
Dr. H Robert Horvitz, a Nobel Laureate and David H. Koch Professor at MIT. His lab at MIT is all about exploring some of the most complex questions in biology of how genes control human development and behavior.
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.
Joi Ito, director of the MIT Media Lab, is also on the boards of several companies such as Sony and Mozilla. Ito has also been working on Akili. The maker movement is particularly interesting to him and he took part in a conversation on the subject at the SouthxSouthwest Festival earlier this year.
Dr. Raju Kucherlapati is the Paul C. Cabot Professor in the Harvard Medical School Department of Genetics, co-founder of Millennium Pharmaceuticals and Abgenix, and a member of President Obama’s Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues.
Update: The company name has evolved over time and is now known as PureTech, not PureTech Health.
