Medical technology and service startups from Spain, France, Kenya, the United Kingdom, South Korea and the United States participate in a boot camp to bolster product quality, efficiency and speed to their products and services to market.
Photo illustration by Andy Keena
March 20, 2023
Mayo Clinic in Arizona and Arizona State University are kicking off the fourth cohort of the MedTech Accelerator on March 20, 2023. The Accelerator brings together leaders from across the globe and healthcare industry to advance their products, knowledge and value propositions right here in the desert.
Arizona’s reputation as a medical destination and biotech ecosystem continues to grow. Most recently, Mayo Clinic acquired 228 acres of undeveloped land surrounding its North Phoenix hospital campus — paving the way for an innovative biotech hub called Discovery Oasis. ASU is Mayo’s inaugural collaborator in realizing this vision.
The Accelerator provides emerging companies with a multi-day immersive curriculum in health care entrepreneurship including: lectures and workshops with world-class scientific and engineering experts; resources to navigate regulatory pathways; and tools for product commercialization and customer acquisition. Additionally, participants attend mentoring, business development, and networking events.
“The international representation of our 2023 cohort of companies is very exciting,” said Rick Hall, assistant dean from the Edson College of Nursing and Health Innovation and co-managing partner of the MedTech Accelerator. “The Accelerator continues to attract highly impressive startups and early-stage companies with innovative solutions working to improve health care access and outcomes. Our ability to draw interest globally speaks to the value of this program and the access to researchers and clinicians made available through the alliance that our two innovative organizations have formed.”
After the two week curriculum portion of the program, the cohort will remain a part of the MedTech Accelerator support network allowing continued collaboration and guidance.
“We're thrilled to welcome a new cohort of innovative companies to our MedTech Accelerator program,” said Dr. Steven Lester, associate medical director of Mayo Clinic’s Department of Business Development and co-founder and chief medical officer of the MedTech Accelerator. “These entrepreneurs are tackling some of the most pressing challenges in health care, and we're excited to help bring their ideas to life to improve patient outcomes. Together, we can push past the boundaries of what's possible today to advance and distribute new, life-changing and sustaining health care solutions.”
This year’s participating companies span a wide range of sectors across health care and medicine:
ABANZA, Spain
ABANZA was founded in 2017 to provide surgeons with a new alternative for soft tissue fixation in the field of Sports Medicine. The WasherCap patented technology has the potential to initiate a new era in the fixation of soft tissue, sutures, tapes, and internal brace, offering a superior strength and giving the ability to surgeons to control and manage the tension of that fixation.
Anuncia Medical, Arizona
Conceptualized in 2014 in collaboration with Boston Children’s Hospital and spun out of Alcyone Therapeutics in 2018, Anuncia’s patented portfolio of technologies are intended to provide peace-of-mind through innovation. The core ReFlow™ technology uses a simple finger depression of a soft silicone dome located under the patient’s scalp to produce a noninvasive, one-way flush of the patient’s own CSF directed toward the ReFlow™ catheter to restore or increase CSF flow through a non-flowing shunt and potentially avoid emergency surgery.
“Partnering with the Mayo Clinic and ASU brings immeasurable benefits as we commercially launch our FDA-cleared, breakthrough ReFlow Mini device into the U.S. Market. These renowned institutions underscore innovation and understand the global significance of bringing lifesaving care from the hospital into the home to empower patients, caregivers, and clinicians with better outcomes, quality of life, and health economics,” said Elsa Chi Abruzzo, CEO and president of Anuncia Medical.
CardioStory, San Francisco
CardioStory is a Cardiovascular Disease Diagnosis and Remote Patient Monitoring Platform based on its novel Non-Invasive Cardiac Filling Pressure (NIFP) Monitoring and Management Device. The vision is to build a digital platform based on non-invasive filling pressure technology for heart failure and kidney disease patients.
Mediwhale, South Korea
Mediwhale Inc. is a Korean AI analytic company that specializes in “Oculomics” — the association between ophthalmic biomarkers and systemic health and disease using retinal photographs. Mediwhale flagship Reti-Intelligence platform™ is a first of its kind retinal-based artificial intelligence platform that provides a 1-stop real-time cardiovascular, renal and metabolism (CVRM) risk assessment and the detection of age-related eye diseases. Reti-Intelligence platform™ aims to augment existing clinician diagnosis and to encourage public participation for CVRM triage for the uncovering of undiagnosed chronic conditions so as to facilitate appropriate clinical or lifestyle intervention to attenuate future CVRM risk.
Memory Lane Games, United Kingdom
Memory Lane Games digital reminiscence platform turns memories into games, increasing positive social engagement for people with dementia and their caregivers/family.
Navi Nurses, Arizona
Navi Nurses is nurse-owned and operated and started taking clients in 2020. They are an on-demand platform that allows the ordinary person to have access to a personalized, registered nurse on-demand. The team has since grown to over 150 registered nurses, who provided over 16,000 hours of care and reached $1.2 million in annual revenue in Phoenix in 2022. The goal is to expand into three other cities by the end of 2023 and build the first version of proprietary technology to go on to raise funding.
“Mayo Clinic is where my story began. It’s where I discovered that nursing was my calling, and it’s where I spent my last eight years working as a nurse. ASU also holds a special place in my heart as it was during my graduate studies there that Rick Hall supported my entrepreneurial endeavors and helped me lay the foundation for Navi Nurses,” said Jasmine Bhatti, CEO of Navi Nurses. “To me, participating in the Accelerator is like coming back to where it all started. Applying for the Accelerator was not only meaningful personally, but it felt like the most natural thing. There is nothing more important to me than building my company with the support of community-focused organizations that deeply value people and support imagining and building new, better ways of doing things.”
Therapixel, France
Therapixel is specialized in the design and commercialization of AI-based medical imaging software, with the goal of delivering pertinent information at the right time to healthcare professionals. Winner of the Digital Mammography DREAM Challenge, the global competition on breast cancer detection with AI, Therapixel has developed MammoScreen™, a software that helps with the interpretation of screening mammograms.
TruLite Health, Arizona
TruLite Health offers the industry’s first comprehensive health equity platform committed to breaking the chain of systemic inequity in healthcare and rebuilding patient trust. Truity™, enterprise solution, brings together a proprietary clinical knowledge base of health equity insights and recommendations with patient-specific clinical and social data sets, enabling care teams to offer actionable clinical, social, and behavioral interventions at the point of care for diverse populations. TruLite’s unique health equity platform supports health systems, payers, and large employers to take swift action by closing health equity care gaps resulting in better patient outcomes, improved provider performance, and lower overall cost of care.
Zuri Health, Kenya
Zuri Health is a virtual health platform providing affordable and accessible healthcare services to patients across Sub-Saharan Africa via mobile app, website, WhatsApp bot, and SMS service. Through their platform, patients can chat with a doctor, buy medications, book diagnostic tests and even have a doctor visit them at home.
About MedTech Accelerator
The MedTech Accelerator is supported by The Mayo Clinic and Arizona State University Alliance for Health Care. The alliance is developing comprehensive improvements in the science of health care delivery and practice, all toward one goal: continually advancing patient care. Together, the recognized world leader in patient care, education and research, and the nation's No. 1-ranked university for innovation are combining expertise from every corner of health care — doctors to bioengineers to business experts — for an adaptive approach to preparing the next generation of health care pioneers and practitioners in our communities.
About Mayo Clinic
Mayo Clinic is a nonprofit organization committed to innovation in clinical practice, education and research, and providing compassion, expertise and answers to everyone who needs healing. Visit the Mayo Clinic News Network for additional Mayo Clinic news.
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