Several accelerators in healthcare continue to move away from consumer applications in favor of more targeted approaches to support physicians, nurses and other healthcare professionals. Increasingly, these classes of startups are just as likely to include one or two medical device companies too. Those trends are reflected in XLerateHealth‘s latest accelerator class.
One of the more interesting companies is Inscope Medical Solutions. The Louisville, Kentucky company developed a Wi-Fi enabled, disposable laryngoscope. It optimizes airway intubation and integrates several devices into one. It seeks a slice of the $1.2 billion laryngoscope market and wants to improve the speed by which they can be deployed, safety and effectiveness. The company, led by CEO Maggie Galloway, won the Global Venture Labs Investment competition in Austin earlier this year. Galloway was previously a consultant at Humana.
iClinical from San Francisco is a data aggregation and analytics platform for clinical trials. CEO Sridhar Byrappa worked as a project manager at Schering-Plough Research Institute and at Accenture, amassing experience in data analytics. The goal is to combine clinical trial insights and built-in collaboration tools to get through the kind of bottlenecks that can slow down decision making and resolutions to speed up drug development. The company previously participated in Iron Yard’s accelerator in South Carolina.
No doubt the oldest company in the pack is Trajectory Healthcare, which hails from Loveland, Ohio. The population health analytics solutions business wants to evaluate, improve and design population health management programs. It is led by epidemiologist Thomas Wilson, who also heads up consulting business Wilson Research. He also serves as board chairman of the Population Health Impact Institute.
MedUX , a Toronto-based business co-founded by Tim Pryor, developed an interface to give surgeons control over the digital components of an operating room while keeping the room sterile. It honed the tools partly through interviews with surgeons, oncologists and biomedical engineers at Johns Hopkins Hospital and the Congress of Neurological Surgeons. It also worked with the Canadian Surgical Technology and Advance Robotics Center at the University of Western Ontario.
SYSGenomics from Granger, Indiana, provides molecular diagnostic tests to enable cancer patients and their oncologists to select the most effective treatment strategy. The company was founded by Steven Buechler, of the Harper Cancer Research Institiute at the University of Notre Dame, Dr. Sunil Badve, the director of Translational Genomics Core at Indiana University School of Medicine, and Yesim Gökmen-Polar, an assistant research professor, also at Indiana University School of Medicine.
Six Sigma Laboratories is the Louisville, Kentucky company behind NormaLyte. Its pharmacists developed a sugar-free, oral rehydration salt product to quickly treat dehydration without a salty taste and without the hydration efficiency loss of sugar-based hydration products, according to a company statement.The company was founded by pharmacists and husband and wife team Sam and Jamie Lee.
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.
iPillBox is a mobile pill organizer that sorts out complicated medication dosage schedules for patients. It helps caregivers and physicians to monitor compliance securely, the statement said.
