Jason S.

AI and Med Tech in Focus   AI System Developed to Identify Pathology in Tissues Engineers at Washington State University have developed an AI tool that uses images of human and animal tissue to detect abnormalities faster and more accurately than people. The AI algorithm was trained using images from past studies that involved kidney, testes, ovarian, prostate, breast and lymph node abnormalities. The new model detected disease in minutes—current processes take humans several hours and require specialized teams to check each other’s work. It was also found to be more accurate, sometimes detecting instances that humans had missed. The engineers designed the system to handle the processing load of the high-resolution gigapixel images by breaking them down into smaller tiles but still retaining the overall context of the tissue sample—akin to the zoom feature on a microscope or phone camera. Aside from getting diagnostic results more accurately and quickly, the new system also shows promise in epigenetics (the study of molecular processes that change gene behavior without changing underlying DNA). Epigenetic researchers can perform analyses and get results that used to take a year or more in just a couple of weeks. VC Investors are always adjusting their "Play Book" with a variety of options for investing. Mikal Ventures is one of those alternatives, offering curated solutions to real world problems. Reach out if you have questions on how we can be of assistance and bookmark https://mikalventures.com/ for additional insights and information.

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Excited for DCVC portfolio co Alta Resource Technologies to emerge from stealth! The design space of biology is many orders of magnitude larger than inorganic chemistry, and Alta uses it to massively reduce the cost of extracting rare earth metals. https://lnkd.in/g_q5UwRF

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After her interesting (and fun!) presentation at Stanford University entitled “Harnessing AI to Enrich Patient Care”, Yaa Kumah-Crystal, MD MPH FAMIA and I discussed whether MDs/NPs are going to be more liable for using AI to make decisions (and making a mistake) or NOT using AI to make decisions (and making a mistake). Thoughts? Stanford Department of Medicine Functional Medicine Research and Technology Center #AI #Healthcare #Ethics #DecisionMaking Grayson Dimick

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AI in Focus  Wearable Camera Detects Injectable Drug Administration Errors Collaborative researchers from Carnegie Mellon University, University of Washington, Makerere University and Toyota Research Institute have developed a wearable camera that uses AI to detect injectable drug administration errors. The system used video data sets from cameras strapped to doctors’ foreheads in different operating rooms with different backgrounds and lighting conditions and focused on the physicians’ hands. Then using deep learning, they trained the algorithm to detect visual clues like vial and syringe shape, label color, and font size to determine what the drug was. Currently, errors happen when a wrong vial is used or the drug label in the syringe is incorrect (vial swap errors) or when the label is correct, but the clinician administers the wrong drug (syringe swap errors). Hospitals use bar codes to prevent these errors, but in high pressure situations, these safeguards sometimes are forgotten. Approximately 1.2 million patients experience errors in injectable medications annually, at a cost of about $5 billion. Using the AI camera system, vial swap errors were detected in 99.6% of cases where they occurred and syringe swap errors in 98.8% of cases.  The next step is for researchers to incorporate the new system into smart eyewear that can provide visual or auditory warnings before a drug is delivered. Further, the new system provides opportunities for automatic documentation of drug injection information and reduced manual record keeping. VC Investors are always adjusting their "Play Book" with a variety of options for investing. Mikal Ventures is one of those alternatives, offering curated solutions to real world problems. Reach out if you have questions on how we can be of assistance and bookmark https://mikalventures.com/ for additional insights and information.

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I'm delighted to share news of this new AI-focused drug discovery company, Xaira, built on foundational technology from David Baker and led by Marc Tessier-Lavigne. The company applies AI tools to unlock opportunities in drug discovery for aspects of biology that we believe are not readily obtainable with conventional methods. I co-led NEA's investment in Xaira, along with my NEA partner and the firm’s co-CEO Mohamad Makhzoumi, and I will be joining Xaira’s board. Our enthusiasm for Xaira based on our belief that applying AI and large language models to biology holds immense promise and is still in its early stages. Currently, the application of AI to biology relies on model architectures borrowed from the tech world. A lack of well-curated clinical training sets hinders building and training these models effectively. This limits the advancement of AI in solving biological problems compared to other fields. Xaira aims to bridge this gap. We now have a clear understanding of the data needed to answer fundamental biological questions. By iterating on leading life science models and using focused perturbation data generated through our large-scale experiments, Xaira will generate data specifically suited to building advanced model architectures that are optimized for biology -- and hopefully, unlock therapeutic opportunities for patients who are not being optimally served by existing therapeutics.

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This is just incredible. Neal Ghosh's demonstration of how #VentureIQ takes deeply technical and complicated content across a range of industrial use cases and ages/stages through an AI-generated conversational podcast (a la #notebookLM) is really mind-blowing. Check out his post, below, and if you haven't seen VentureIQ, yet, let's get you set up to learn more. You can visit VentureIQ.ai or DM any of us over here to book a demo!

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Hot off the pre-print server – an important publication authored by the Atropos Health team exploring the performance of LLMs in answering real-world clinical questions. LLMs excel at summarizing and contextualizing existing literature, but cannot generate de novo medical evidence today. The results of the study highlight performance gains attributable to injecting novel, relevant, and up-to-date medical evidence into LLM-powered clinical decision support systems. Brigham Hyde Nigam Shah Saurabh Gombar Read the study here: https://lnkd.in/ecuU25Pq

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Excited to announce Frist Cressey Ventures' investment in Qualified Health and privileged to partner w/ SignalFire, Healthier Capital, Town Hall Ventures and others!   Healthcare costs are increasing at a faster rate than ever before, with the US spending nearly twice as other wealthy countries and still ranking bottom in outcomes. It's a story you've all heard - - US healthcare is known for astronomical inefficiencies, waste, workforce supply constraints, fragmented access, appalling patient experiences, and driving patients and businesses into debt.   Yes these problems present opportunities. But opportunities are limited to the system's appetite for change, desire and incentive to try something new and the innovation available. At FCV we believe we've hit the trifecta with Generative AI. Generative AI has given us truly transformational tools in the toolkit and the healthcare ecosystem is demanding to absorb its benefits. This perfect collision of supply and demand means healthcare is poised for big change.   Generative AI is everywhere, it's buzzy, it dangles hope and opportunity. But many things need to be true for the Gen AI transformation in healthcare to take hold, such as but not limited to:   💡 Patient lives and data need to remain safe: We believe in a highly regulated and human life-touching sector such as healthcare we must ensure Gen AI can drive to unrivalled savings and improvements in the quality of care WHILE not putting patient lives or data at risk.   💡 Systems need to own their utilization of Gen AI: We believe systems will use some hybrid of external partners and homegrown solutions but importantly will want full control of data provisioning and utilization as well as the ability to solve an unlimited number of nuanced issues and not cookie cutter algorithms.   💡 Costs need to be looked at on an enterprise level: We believe the speed of innovation in Gen AI means costs will continue decreasing dramatically but at an enterprise level this will still not be a small detail. Systems will want the ability to understand costs and delegate as needed for the outcomes desired at the organizational level.   Enter Qualified.   We knew when we met Justin Norden, MD, MBA, MPhil and team we were standing in front of changemakers. These individuals have lived and breathed the true application and implementation of Generative AI far before we were asking ChatGPT to write our emails. In fact, if you’ve ever driven in a Waymo you’ve benefited from past products this team has built.   Qualified Health is on a mission to enforce governance in Gen AI, allow systems to rapidly build for their needs, monitor and make decisions for all GenAI (homegrown and external) and accelerate the value the sector can glean from these new technologies.   Huge shout out to William T., Tommaso Auerbach and Jamie Kuntz for their hard work!

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TLDR - if you’re a early-stage investor, builder or health care provider that believes the below facts... we at Conduit Venture Labs have a stealth venture in the oven w/ Krisna Bhargava, PhD (let's connect). 🦠 Environmental factors are responsible for ~90% of chronic disease. https://lnkd.in/gSJPGXVs 🥺 Primary care does not have the time nor education to screen environmental exposure. https://lnkd.in/gJ5GtHMV 🚀 Functional/integrative care is growing at ~23% CAGR but is unaffordable to most people. https://lnkd.in/gWwuChYk

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At Innosphere Ventures, we’ve assessed 50+ Life Sciences startups, and we’ve noticed a trend among founders: to successfully solicit funding from investors, they need to create balance in their go-to-market strategies to be investor ready. This isn’t a surprising finding, given the majority of our founders’ status as first-time founders and academic entrepreneurs. We have amazing university partners, so the companies that they refer to us are excellent at their product and the science, they often have the foundation of a really great team, and they are on their way to a strong intellectual property strategy. But they tend to underbake the less academic parts of their investor-ready story. That’s where our Incubator comes in: to help founders balance their commercial model and story so that they’re ready to approach potential investors with an airtight business plan. With the right development, regulatory, clinical, and financial plans in hand, they’ll be able to convincingly pitch to investors how they plan to get revenue and traction, how they plan to get investors’ money back, and how they’ll generate growth… all music to investors’ ears. Our Incubator takes talented, knowledgeable founders, identifies any investor-readiness needs in their skill sets, and fills them in with critical go-to-market knowledge. That way, when they approach investors, they’ll have the full suite of product, science, and GTM know-how to successfully win funding.

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AI and Med Tech in Focus   AI System Developed to Identify Pathology in Tissues Engineers at Washington State University have developed an AI tool that uses images of human and animal tissue to detect abnormalities faster and more accurately than people. The AI algorithm was trained using images from past studies that involved kidney, testes, ovarian, prostate, breast and lymph node abnormalities. The new model detected disease in minutes—current processes take humans several hours and require specialized teams to check each other’s work. It was also found to be more accurate, sometimes detecting instances that humans had missed. The engineers designed the system to handle the processing load of the high-resolution gigapixel images by breaking them down into smaller tiles but still retaining the overall context of the tissue sample—akin to the zoom feature on a microscope or phone camera. Aside from getting diagnostic results more accurately and quickly, the new system also shows promise in epigenetics (the study of molecular processes that change gene behavior without changing underlying DNA). Epigenetic researchers can perform analyses and get results that used to take a year or more in just a couple of weeks. VC Investors are always adjusting their "Play Book" with a variety of options for investing. Mikal Ventures is one of those alternatives, offering curated solutions to real world problems. Reach out if you have questions on how we can be of assistance and bookmark https://mikalventures.com/ for additional insights and information.

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We end every episode of The Biotech Startups Podcast by asking if there’s anyone our guest would like to thank. Without fail, they thank their families – Mom, Dad, grandparents, spouses, partners. Often, there are shoutouts to early mentors, advisors, or colleagues as well. What all those people have in common, is that they’re the ones who believed in them and bet on them early. Whether it was family support during their formative years... Extraordinarily patient spouses/partners... Professors who said “Sure, come join my lab,” before they really knew a bunsen burner from a beaker… What we seem to attract in the life sciences, is a ton of good will, gratitude, and a willingness to pay it forward. I might be biased, but it always feels to me like we might have even more of that than any other industry. Maybe it’s the mission-minded nature of the life sciences. Maybe it’s something else. But it’s clear we’re extraordinarily lucky to have people willing to bet on us early and often. As far as pattern recognition goes, it’s one I’m happy to see again and again. #biotechnology #lifesciences #thebiotechstartupspodcast

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Since our last DataFAIR, there was been an overwhelming activities at the intersection of life sciences and GenAI. The Nobel Prize committee's decision aside, there has been ~1000s of papers published, ~100s of Foundation Models released, ~10s of companies funded all in the last 12 months. It is often quite hard to keep up and make sense of all of this. As we approach #datafair2024 on October 17 In Boston, we are taking our role as a credible AI-partner for our customers more seriously than ever. This year’s focus on #FoundationModels in biopharma presents significant opportunities for innovation which brings me to the key themes for this symposium: 1. Multimodal Integration: Leveraging diverse data for comprehensive indication expansion 2. Data Quality Standards: Establishing benchmarks for single-cell biology foundation models 3. Synthetic Data in LLMs: Evaluating efficacy and ethics in data generation Future Architectures: Exploring novel structures for biomedical foundation models One of the things we have heard from participants for #DataFAIR events is that it has consistently delivered on keeping the conversation credible. With all the hype and noise around GenAI we as an organization take that role seriously. This year, we're poised to build on that vein of being your credible AI partner. To our invited attendees: Your insights at #DataFAIR 2024 will be crucial in shaping the future of #BiopharmaInnovation R&D.

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If you work in tech transfer this is a good read-in on how our diligence tech can assess and evaluate assets with minimal inputs. The best way to learn more is to see it live! Reach out to me directly to learn more!

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I'm so excited to continue supporting Prolific Machines, Inc., and the incredible Deniz Kent, PhD ,Max Huisman, and Declan Jones. Today's cellular biology processes are incredibly expensive, inefficient, imprecise, and sometimes purely ineffective. These processes are used from everything from making antibodies to treat diseases, to fermentation used to make high-value nutritional proteins in baby formula, to whole cuts of cultured meat. Prolific has developed a biology platform that leverages light to guide cell behavior and optimize performance over time using AI. By combining light, bioengineering, hardware, and AI in fundamentally new ways, Prolific can help pharmaceutical, nutritional, and therapeutics companies get to market faster, less expensively, and more efficiently — ultimately in hopes of helping improve outcomes — a mission any of us can get behind. Mark Cuban Peter T. Frederick Blackford Cooper Rinzler David Adelman Darco Capital Breakthrough Energy Michael Schulson Kevin Love Tobias Harris Breyer Capital Charles Besser Brennan Besser Lettuce Entertain You Restaurants https://lnkd.in/ea2TqdQk

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Exciting to see startups aiming to use AI to discover chemicals, materials, drugs, etc. Semi companies have taken notice: AMD is investing in and Cadence is acquiring them. Semi/EDA companies have broken out by becoming critical path, whether it’s through critical software, packaging, IP, design kits from foundries, or user communities. Aside from just making it easy to make new materials, these “AI for making X” companies also need to articulate a vision as to how they can establish monopolistic positions in their industries.

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A SAFE and convertible note had a baby and Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati was the midwife- out popped the D-SAFE! 👶🏽🎉 A new #climatetech funding instrument was announced by Elemental Excelerator last week. One of the company’s main goals is to support smaller, up and coming companies during the awkward “Scale Gap” phase between #VC funding and natural growth. It’s called the #DSAFE (Development Simple Agreement for Future Equity) and it aims to aid the process by giving companies a small amount of cash to overcome initial risks and expenses during the developmental stages of a product launch or company. How does it work? D-SAFE has a redemption clause meaning companies can choose to have their payments offered as a loan or convert to equity at the investor’s discretion. Funders and companies will have clear communication and expectations about where the money is going and how it will be applied to either the company or the projects at hand. Financiers and companies will work together with more #transparency, and that’s a great boon for #startups and VC alike. As of this month, Elemental has already invested using D-SAFE in eight different companies, including Dimensional Energy and Origen — both companies investing in innovative and out-of-the-box solutions to environmental issues! Seems like a win-win on the surface. What do you all think about the D-SAFE? Alfredo Coppola Momoka Ueda Tim Wagner Stephen D. Torres Olya Irzak Natsuho Toyama Noriya Tarutani Shin Ogawa

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Excited to share our latest Innovation Wave Podcast episode featuring Ana Maria Moreno, Founder and CEO of Navega Therapeutics! Dr. Moreno sat down with Bob McGriff and me and shared her vision for Navega Therapeutics - aiming to have the first next-generation, long-lasting single injection for chronic pain approved within five years. In this engaging conversation, we explored: • Dr. Moreno's journey from PhD student to biotech entrepreneur • Navega Therapeutics' innovative approach to chronic pain treatment using epigenetic gene therapy • The company's focus on non-opioid solutions for conditions like small fiber neuropathy and rheumatoid arthritis • How the San Diego biotech ecosystem has played a crucial role in Navega's growth and development. Key Takeaways: • The company is preparing for first-in-human clinical trials, with a $40 million Series A funding round in progress. • Dr. Moreno emphasizes the importance of business knowledge for scientists aspiring to become entrepreneurs. Congratulations to Dr. Moreno on her well-deserved Biocom California Catalyst award, and thank you for sharing your insights on innovation and entrepreneurship in the life sciences! https://lnkd.in/g5ieMmqY

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Excited for this one. Congrats to Alex Cohen and Hello Patient on their seed round announcement. Hello Patient stands to change the communication paradigm between patients and providers forever. Their generative AI call agent technology is tackling the tremendous admin burden of patient facing comms (scheduling, follow ups, referrals, prescription refills, etc). Massive opportunity and we think Alex and his team are expertly positioned to become market leaders. Max Ventures is thrilled to co-lead the seed round with 8VC and Bling Capital A great quote below from Alex highlighting the concept of "service as a software". Healthcare is a heavily service oriented industry - so the opportunity for step change is even more profound. The startup's approach is part of a paradigm shift where AI companies are offering service as software. "I'm a big believer that the right way to do this is through a managed services business. We're not building SaaS. I believe we can do this services as software where what was traditionally a services business now has software margins because I don't have to go employ a whole bunch of people to do the services under the hood," Cohen noted. https://lnkd.in/ehNN2AmW

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