Virta Health endocrinologist Caroline Roberts and Virta Health physician Jeff Stanley
Virta Health, a healthcare startup that’s focused on reversing Type 2 diabetes, has closed a Series B round. The $45 million raised by the business will be used to pursue partnerships with employers, health plans, and the government, according to a company blog post.
Program participants work with a physician and an online health coach. They also receive nutrition, guidance on changing their habits, biometric feedback, and peer support.
Virta added new investors with the Series B round, including Founders Fund and Playground Global. Returning investors Venrock, Obvious Ventures, Creandum, Caffeinated Capital, and Max Levchin’s SciFi VC also participated.
To date, the company has raised $82 million. Prior to the Series B round, Virta raised a $30 million Series A round led by Venrock. Obvious Ventures led a $7 million seed round. Other investors in the business include Allen & Co., Redmile Group, and PayPal and Affirm founder Max Levchin’s Scifi VC.
Finnish founder Sami Inkinen, who also cofounded online real estate business Trulia, used the blog post to highlight some additional goals with the fundraise. He noted that the company would use some of the funding to hire experienced product, engineering, data science, and clinical team members to improve the Virta Health’s capabilities in machine learning and AI to boost outcomes further.
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.
We are also investing in our commercialization team to form additional partnerships with employers, health plans and government. Our goal is simple: every person living with type 2 diabetes should have (free) access to the Virta Treatment.
An ongoing study of 349 adults with Types 2 diabetes found that after one year, 262 adults given the company’s continuous care intervention (CCI) program were able to make significant changes in their health. While 60 percent of participants in the continuous care intervention group achieved a HbA1c below 48 mmol mol?1 (< 6.5 percent) without taking diabetes medications or taking metformin only, only 10 percent of the 87 participants in the control group achieved this status, the study said.
On average, the CCI group lowered HbA1c levels from 7.6 percent to 6.3 percent, lost 12 percent of their body weight, and reduced diabetes medication use, according to the study findings, which were published in Diabetes Today in February. More than 90 percent of patients who were prescribed insulin reduced or stopped their insulin use, and sulfonylureas were eliminated in all patients.
Still, diabetes management startups often get criticized for focusing their efforts on a homogeneous patient population. To that end, the article on the study pointed out that treatment intensity of the CCI and control groups was unequal. Participants in the continuous care program were intensely monitored and received personalized attention compared with the control group. The Diabetes Today article of the study also took issue with the lack of diversity across, age, race, and condition severity.
Diabetes management represents a significant opportunity for those who can whittle down the number of people with the condition. Virta Health goes further than most companies with their ambitions to reverse Type 2 diabetes. The complexity of the condition is that it is often associated with other chronic conditions and depending on patients’ resources, access to care and other factors. It will be interesting to see whether Virta Health can demonstrate that its approach is scalable to a more diverse patient population.
Photo: Virta Health
