Tag Archives: Health Moonshot

Qura’s Tiny Implantables Could Revolutionize How We Treat Hypertension



When it comes to health technology, often the next big thing is really, really small.

Our guest on the show this week, Dr. Will Hendren, has seen personally that when it comes to implanting a medical device in the body, size matters.

Dr. Hendren spent decades as a surgeon working with rescue devices like pacemakers, which themselves have evolved from being the size of a pack of cigarettes to being smaller than a triple A battery. It doesn’t take a degree in biomechanical engineering to appreciate that you want a lower profile machine sitting next to your heart.

Now, with his company Qura – a member of the StartUp Health community since 2016 – Dr. Hendren is taking that concept to the next level. He and his team are the leading edge of miniaturizing medical devices to such an extreme degree that it opens up a whole new market for remote patient monitoring.

In our interview we’ll talk about how Dr. Hendren and his team have built an implantable the size of a vitamin that can take blood pressure readings passively and transmit that information to the patient and their caregiver wirelessly. We’ll talk about some of the tiny tech that it was necessary to invent in order to make this breakthrough possible, and we’ll talk about how remote monitoring at scale could be a gamechanger for hypertension and heart disease, which are two of the top causes of death globally.

Let’s get into it!


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Phyllis Ferrell Named Chief Impact Officer for StartUp Health’s Alzheimer’s Moonshot



In January, StartUp Health launched the Alzheimer’s Moonshot with support from the Alzheimer’s Drug Discovery Foundation (ADDF) and Gates Ventures. The Alzheimer’s Moonshot is an invitation to Health Transformers, Alzheimer’s funders, foundations, advocates, and innovators, as well as leading startups and research teams, to unite in pioneering comprehensive, collaborative approaches to Alzheimer’s disease.

The Alzheimer’s Moonshot Community is powered by StartUp Health and our Health Transformer University, an entrepreneurial mastery program and lifelong learning community for ambitious founders and funders who are solving the biggest health challenges of our time.

That brings us to our podcast guest this week. Phyllis Ferrell, DrPH, will serve as the Chief Impact Officer of the Alzheimer’s Moonshot and lead its Impact Board. Ferrell has three decades of related experience, most recently serving as the Global Head of Alzheimer’s and Neurodegeneration at Eli Lilly and Strategic Advisor to the Davos Alzheimer’s Collaborative. The Alzheimer’s Moonshot Impact Board will also include representatives from the ADDF, Gates Ventures, and a diverse group of stakeholders from industry, clinical medicine, academia, investment and patient and caregiver communities.

As we will discuss in the episode, shortly after Ferrell transferred from a marketing and sales role at Lilly to leading their Alzheimer’s division, her father was diagnosed with the devastating disease. She threw herself into the work and eventually became a leading voice in Alzheimer’s research and drug development. She’s served as a strategic advisor to multiple high-profile Alzheimer’s organizations, and now she’s marshaling her experience to lead StartUp Health’s Alzheimer’s Moonshot. We caught up with her to get a better understanding of where she sees this initiative going and why this is such a unique moment in time for Alzheimer’s innovation.

Enjoy the episode and then learn more about StartUp Health’s Alzheimer’s Moonshot at startuphealth.com/alzheimers.


Innovating in Alzheimer’s disease? Learn how you can join our Alzheimer’s Moonshot.
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Gamification in Healthcare: How Two Founders Are Using Games to Heal



This week, we’re talking about gamification in healthcare. Gamification has been a popular buzzword in tech and in health, but it just means using elements we associate with games in non-game contexts. It means capitalizing on the motivations we find in games through things like progress updates and level-up badges to change behaviors and get us to do things that are going to be good for our health.

Today on the show, we’re talking to two founders who are gamifying the healthcare experience in two unique ways.

The first conversation is with Raj Amin, CEO & Co-founder of Arcade Therapeutics, a company that has been in the StartUp Health community since TK. They are a science-first game studio developing games that act like medicine, focusing on mental health. We’ll hear exactly what they’re building and why clinical research is key to their approach.

Then we’ll hear from Farhaneh Ahmadi, PhD, CEO & Co-founder of eddii, a company that is part of our T1D Moonshot. She and her team are using mobile gaming elements to help young people with their Type 1 diabetes management. Her company uses a character named eddii that talks to the user, tells them stories, and plays games with them – making it more relatable and more enjoyable to manage diabetes.

Listen in to learn more about these innovative approaches to improving health.

 


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Why the CEO of the American Diabetes Association (ADA) Joined StartUp Health’s Health Moonshot Impact Board



Since 2020, Charles “Chuck” Henderson has led the American Diabetes Association (ADA) as CEO. In 2023, he joined StartUp Health’s Health Moonshot Impact Board, a unique, multi-disciplinary group of stakeholders passionate about advancing health innovation. On the Health Moonshot Impact Board, Henderson joins top thought leaders like Dr. Toby Cosgrove (former CEO, Cleveland Clinic) and Sue Siegel (former CEO, GE Ventures).

In this StartUp Health NOW episode, StartUp Health’s Logan Plaster sat down with Henderson to learn about his priorities in leading the ADA and why it was important to him to join StartUp Health’s moonshot community.


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Looking to break down health barriers? If you’re an entrepreneur or investor, contact us to learn how you can join our Health Equity Moonshot.
Passionate about Type 1 diabetes? If you’re an entrepreneur or investor, contact us to learn how you can join our T1D Moonshot.


No More Suffering in Silence: Meet Two Founders Tackling Gut Health



On this week’s StartUp Health NOW episode, we’re talking about the future of gut health with Jeff Glueck, CEO & Co-founder of Salvo Health, and Swathi Arulguppe, CEO & Founder at BetterMeal AI.

There’s no doubt gut health is having a moment.

For a long time, health issues in the gut, like irritable bowel syndrome and Crohn’s disease, were met with outdated pamphlets about diets. The result was millions of people suffering in silence with painful, life-limiting conditions.

It’s not that GI doctors didn’t want to help. There just didn’t seem to be a lot that they could do.

Thankfully our understanding of the importance of gut health – and its connection to mental health and whole health – has resulted in a wave of innovation. And on this podcast episode, we’ll talk to some amazing entrepreneurs working to break this cycle and bring relief to patients.

Our first guest, Jeff Glueck was the CEO of Foursquare before he co-founded Salvo Health. He’s taking on gut health from two innovative angles.

The first is through the establishment of a digital clinic which makes specialty GI care available to patients at scale and on demand. Second, Glueck and his team are capitalizing on the latest research connecting gut health to mental health and other conditions. This connection between the gut microbiome and whole health is just exploding and Salvo is helping patients stay on the cutting edge.

Then we’ll check in with Swathi Arulguppe, CEO & Founder of BetterMeal AI.

You’ll hear how Arulguppe has taken her own journey with a debilitating GI condition, combined it with her passion for data, and built a platform for helping deliver AI-driven personalized meal recommendations to patients. By understanding the biological connections between human gut and food at the deepest level, she has built an app that helps guide its users on how to best manage their gut health through their nutrition.

Let’s jump in and find out where we are in gut health innovation.

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Want more content like this? You can subscribe to the podcast as well as other health innovation updates at startuphealth.com/content.
Sign up for StartUp Health Insider™ to get funding insights, news, and special updates delivered to your inbox.

Looking to break down health barriers? If you’re an entrepreneur or investor, contact us to learn how you can join our Health Equity Moonshot.
Passionate about Type 1 diabetes? If you’re an entrepreneur or investor, contact us to learn how you can join our T1D Moonshot.


Thriving Seniors: How These Founders Are Upgrading Senior Care from Early Disease Detection to Care Coordination




Food as Medicine: The Next Wave of Tech-Enabled Nutrition



At StartUp Health we’re all about what’s new and what’s next in health, and that often means talking about cutting-edge technology. But sometimes the most radical way to improve is also the simplest. One example? Our food.

This week, as we head into Thanksgiving in the United States, we’re talking about the role food plays in managing not just our weight and fitness, but actual chronic diseases. Some people use the term ‘Food as Medicine,’ and the more research we do, the more ways we find that tuning our nutrition can sometimes be superior to taking more pharmaceuticals.

While the idea of seeing food as a legitimate healthcare tool isn’t new, per se, there are some exciting new tools and platforms that leverage nutritional information and make it more accessible to the world. And that’s what we’re going to talk about on this episode.

Our first guest is Shireen Abdullah, CEO & Founder at Yumlish, who joined the StartUp Health community in 2019. Shireen’s platform puts a virtual nutritionist in your pocket, with a strong emphasis on boosting health literacy. She’s also worked very closely with the Air Force on workforce readiness. Turns out there are so many young people who are overweight and inactive that it’s hindering military recruitment and becoming a national security threat.

After Shireen we’ll hear from Victor Penev, CEO & Founder of Edamam, a Health Transformer since all the way back in 2013. Victor has made the world’s food knowledge more searchable through Edamam’s API so that users of platforms like NOOM and Virta Health can get personalized meal recommendations. We’ll also hear about their brand new integration with Open AI that brings a ChatGPT experience to the process of finding personalized meal plans.

Enjoy the episode!


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Want more content like this? You can subscribe to the podcast as well as other health innovation updates at startuphealth.com/content.
Sign up for StartUp Health Insider™ to get funding insights, news, and special updates delivered to your inbox.

Looking to break down health barriers? If you’re an entrepreneur or investor, contact us to learn how you can join our Health Equity Moonshot.
Passionate about Type 1 diabetes? If you’re an entrepreneur or investor, contact us to learn how you can join our T1D Moonshot.


Neolth Teams Up with NBA Star Kenny Thomas to Bring Mental Health Tools to Kids



According to some estimates, out of the HHS, nearly 50% of kids have experienced some kind of mental health challenge. And not just anxiety about an upcoming test or depression over a breakup, but persistent feelings that interfere with daily activities.

Health innovation companies have been on the case for years, including many from the StartUp Health community. They’re tackling the science – like what’s the best way to treat mental health challenges in teens – and they’re also tackling engagement. You can have the best tools in the world after all, but if a young person doesn’t want to get help, it’ll never go anywhere.

Enter Katherine Grill, PhD, CEO & Co-founder of Neolth, one of our guests on this podcast episode. She’s taken her doctorate in behavioral neuroscience and her experience as a clinician, combined with hundreds of interviews with young people, in order to build a platform that meets kids where they’re at – offering self-guided mental health support in a variety of forms and flavors.

Joining the podcast with us is former pro basketball player, Kenny Thomas. After spending 11 seasons in the NBA, Thomas became an entrepreneur and community advocate, with a focus on youth experiencing financial hardship via his own foundation. And now he’s throwing his influence behind Neolth in order to help young people, particularly those involved in sports, gain access to mental health services.

On this StartUp Health NOW episode, we’ll cover the ins and outs of the Neolth platform as well as some of Dr. Grill’s strategy behind working with a brand ambassador, which is somewhat unique in the world of early-stage health startups.

Let’s get into it.


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Want more content like this? You can subscribe to the podcast as well as other health innovation updates at startuphealth.com/content.
Sign up for StartUp Health Insider™ to get funding insights, news, and special updates delivered to your inbox.

Looking to break down health barriers? If you’re an entrepreneur or investor, contact us to learn how you can join our Health Equity Moonshot.
Passionate about Type 1 diabetes? If you’re an entrepreneur or investor, contact us to learn how you can join our T1D Moonshot.


Quantifying Mental Health: How Mobio Interactive Is Unleashing Precision Psychiatry at Scale



There’s a phrase that gets thrown around a lot in business: “You can’t manage what you can’t measure.” It’s a quote attributed to Peter Drucker, the famed management consultant.‌

If business leaders such as Peter Drucker are right, not being able to measure the effect of an action would make it impossible to know if we should be doing more or less of that action – or if we should be doing it at all.

But if the saying is true in management, it’s even more true in clinical medicine in most areas of healthcare. Despite this seeming to be self evident, you’ve got to measure it to manage it yet there are still swathes of care that are delivered by some version of trial and error.‌

Our guest this week is Bechara Saab, PhD, CEO, Chief Scientist & Co-founder of Mobio Interactive, a company that joined the StartUp Health community in 2022.‌

Dr. Saab started as an academic researcher. It’s safe to say he loves measuring, loves gathering hard data and proving that he has found causation not just correlation in his work. So when his research introduced him to the modern world of mental health diagnosis and mental healthcare, he was taken aback by what he saw as a lack of solid objective measurements.‌

How could you help someone with anxiety, for instance, if you couldn’t accurately measure their anxiety before and after a treatment?‌

That is the thorny challenge that Dr. Saab is tackling with Mobio Interactive.

As you’ll hear, he’ll explain just how his research led to a solution that provides those objective measurements. His company, based in Singapore, came up with an accessible tool that provides clinically-validated therapy within a platform that objectively quantifies how a patient’s mental health is affected by therapy in real time and without a wearable, thereby allowing personalization of mental health therapy at scale.

Enjoy!


FundersBecome a Health Moonshot Champion
Want more content like this? You can subscribe to the podcast as well as other health innovation updates at startuphealth.com/content.
Sign up for StartUp Health Insider™ to get funding insights, news, and special updates delivered to your inbox.

Looking to break down health barriers? If you’re an entrepreneur or investor, contact us to learn how you can join our Health Equity Moonshot.
Passionate about Type 1 diabetes? If you’re an entrepreneur or investor, contact us to learn how you can join our T1D Moonshot.


Virtual Reality for Brain Health: Virtuleap’s New Platform Uses VR to Detect Cognitive Decline Early



Our StartUp Health NOW guest this week is Amir Bozorgzadeh, CEO & Co-founder of Virtuleap, a brain health company that joined StartUp Health in 2019.

Headquartered in Lisbon, Portugal, and expanding to Barcelona, Spain, Virtuleap improves brain health with VR. In this chat, Amir will walk us through their new platform – Cogniclear VR – that combines neuroscience with virtual reality games and activities to detect cognitive disorders. He’ll explain how VR can play an important role in the diagnosis of Alzheimer’s and other dementias, why VR needs to be applied with care in health, and where virtual reality is going next.

Enjoy!


FundersBecome a Health Moonshot Champion
Want more content like this? You can subscribe to the podcast as well as other health innovation updates at startuphealth.com/content.
Sign up for StartUp Health Insider™ to get funding insights, news, and special updates delivered to your inbox.

Looking to break down health barriers? If you’re an entrepreneur or investor, contact us to learn how you can join our Health Equity Moonshot.
Passionate about Type 1 diabetes? If you’re an entrepreneur or investor, contact us to learn how you can join our T1D Moonshot.