WTM Bulletin #10: From Wall Street to Care Street. Latest musings on Health Care Venture Capital, Private Equity, and Care Delivery. Innovation. Transformation.
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6 topics = 3 headlines. 2 startup or VC/PE firm news. 1+ closing thoughts. Follow me on twitter @Mahek_MD
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HEADLINES
Eclipse and Mayo Clinic Create Nucleus RadioPharma to Better Serve Cancer Patients
- Nucleus RadioPharma (Minnesota), aims to help cancer patients gain access to radiopharmaceutical therapies: $6M Seed led by Eclipse and Mayo Clinic.
- Eclipse, a venture capital firm investing in the digital transformation of the world’s physical industries, and Mayo Clinic, a leading nonprofit health organization, today announced the creation and seed funding of Nucleus RadioPharma, a new company built to ensure cancer patients can access potentially life-saving radiopharmaceuticals by developing technologies to modernize the clinical development, manufacturing, and supply chain of these promising new therapies.
- “Radiopharmaceuticals are proving to be highly effective treatment tools across a variety of cancer types, but the inefficiencies across the development, manufacturing, and supply chain have inhibited their widespread utilization. As the field of theranostics evolves, it will be imperative that we can develop and deliver these life-changing agents effectively to all patients who may benefit from their use,” Conroy said.
- Eclipse and Mayo Clinic collaborated to build Nucleus RadioPharma, beginning with $6 million in seed funding, to bring these treatments to the market at a cost, scale, and efficacy that will impact millions of lives. The organization draws on Eclipse’s experience creating companies with advanced manufacturing technologies, as well as the deep oncology expertise of Mayo Clinic, one of the largest nuclear medicine practices in the world.
- “Mayo Clinic is on a mission to transform our cancer care practice by integrating research with clinical care to ensure that every patient we serve, across the U.S. and the world, has access to state-of-the-art cancer clinical trials and the newest treatments. We believe that radiopharmaceuticals are highly innovative new therapies with tremendous potential to help cancer patients,” said Cheryl Willman, M.D., Executive Director of Mayo Clinic Cancer Programs. “The collaboration with Nucleus RadioPharma will provide enhanced manufacturing capabilities so Mayo Clinic can rapidly deliver radiopharmaceuticals, empowering us to better serve our patients today, and enabling the development and clinical testing of novel targeted radiotherapies in the future.”
- Radiopharmaceuticals are poised to become a core modality of cancer diagnosis, staging and treatment, but their success has been broadly hampered by manufacturing and supply chain issues. The treatments are expensive and have short-lived radioactivity, which means they must be produced daily, often in small batches, and sometimes even individually for each patient. However, after a patient is approved to receive a radiotherapy, current supply chain limitations mean that some patients must wait more than a month for the treatment to be manufactured and delivered to the hospital.
- “New therapeutic modalities, such as radiopharmaceuticals require new infrastructure to unlock their full potential,” said Justin Butler, Partner at Eclipse.
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Moderna and Merck will jointly develop a cancer vaccine for high-risk melanoma patients.
Moderna and Merck will jointly develop and sell a cancer vaccine that is personalized for individual patients, the companies announced Wednesday October 12th.
Moderna’s vaccine, based on its messenger RNA technology, is being studied in combination with Merck’s Keytruda to treat patients with high-risk melanoma, the deadliest form of skin cancer, in a phase two trial. The companies expect to report data in the fourth quarter of this year.
In case you have not heard, Hearing aids are now available over the counter at Walmart, Walgreens, CVS and Best Buy
- In a win for consumers, Americans who have mild or moderate hearing loss can now purchase hearing aids without a prescription or medical exam from Walgreens, CVS and Best Buy.
- Prior to the FDA ruling and subsequent Executive Order by President Biden, consumers had to obtain hearing aids with a prescription, using up valuable consumer and clinical teams’ time and energy. Aids are selling between $199-$999, compared to $2000-$8000 when it was prescription only.
- The FDA, in an analysis, estimated that over-the-counter hearing aids could save consumers about $1,438 each because they are not bundled with costly professional services.
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VENTURE CAPITAL / PRIVATE EQUITY
V3 Ventures has launched a $98M fund to invest in beauty, health, e-commerce, food, and beverage companies. V3 has ties with Verlinvest.
More:
- The fund is going to invest in Pre-Seed and Series-A stage startups.
- V3 Ventures will invest in startups founded in the U.S., the U.K., Europe, and India.
- The firm is backed by Verlinvest, a Belgium-based family office known for investments in Oatly, Chewy.com, Vita Coco, etc.
- Arjun Vaidya will lead the company’s investments in the Indian market.
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Treeline Biosciences, an oncology biotech startup, raised $261M through a Series A funding round. The funding brings the firm’s total funds raised to date to $473M. Rock Springs Capital, OrbiMed, Access Industries, and ARCH Venture Partners participated in the fundraiser.
Acclaimed pharmaceutical executive and Oncology veteran Josh Bilenker has established the firm.
- Bilenker was formerly employed in the oncology division of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
- He later founded Loxo Oncology, which was acquired by Eli Lilley for $8B in 2019.
- Treeline employs over 130 people across its three offices in California, Connecticut, and Massachusetts.
- This is the second-highest funding among oncology biotech startups this year.
- The honors for the biggest fundraiser in the domain this year goes to multinomics platform Freenome, which raised a $290M funding round in January 2022.
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CLOSING THOUGHTS
This week we have seen in the news the emergence of RSV beyond just impacting infants, the reminders from the White House COVID-19 Czar Dr. Ashish Jha to get your boosters, especially if you are older, and the cooler weather emerging in the global north. Amongst the local backdrop, the annual historic Head of the Charles Regatta takes places at the Charles River in Cambridge, Massachusetts where rowers from around the world spend the weekend racing, sporting, and enjoying the delights of Boston!
That said, October-December is often when companies and their strategy, business development, and partnerships teams aim to close out some of their pipeline to meet year-end goals, exceed OKRs, and go ‘beyond expectations’. One proud collaboration that I saw two weeks ago was Google Health Care Studio and Desert Oasis Healthcare (DOHC), who provides medical care and wellness services to patients in the Coachella Valley and surrounding desert communities of Riverside and San Bernardino counties in California. It is part of the Heritage Provider Network serving more than 60,000 members with 110 primary care providers and 350 specialists.
With this partnership Google aims to be moving more towards outpatient care. To me this makes sense. Arming the primary care practice, particularly the primary care physician, with search, cloud, and AI/ML NLP solutions increases their ability to do their job. Which is often a combination of finding and retrieving information in the medical record and documenting treatment and management in the medical record. This move, coupled with moves of leveraging their YouTube asset as a dispenser and source of high quality, vetted health information, could be quite compelling. Using YouTube to me is a form of meeting people where they are at by providing them with health information. Dr. Google is already the 3rd most popular type of search query on Google Search so finding ways to leverage the core competencies of Google make sense.
In a way, its Google working at their Top Of License! Search, Cloud, AI/ML, etc.
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Disclaimer: The information presented here does not serve as investment advice. This is for informational purposes only.
Author biography:
As a former Citigroup investment banker and economist turn Medical Doctor, entrepreneur, consultant, and investor, I see health care evolve and transform through a very unique lens.
Sitting at the intersection of health, technology, and business with functional roles as an executive in strategy, partnerships, and innovation, I’m eager to share my weekly findings with you, my growing worldwide audience.
Please subscribe and feel free to leave a comment below. I sit at the intersection of Wall Street. Tech. Medicine. I’m an MD with Buy-side, Sell-side, & Bedside Manner. Alumni and faculty networks from Harvard, Cornell, Baylor College of Medicine, and Rice. I’m the world’s only Doctor to work with all 3 modern business icons Michael Porter, Robert Kaplan, and Clay Christensen. You can find me on twitter @Mahek_MD .