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Life Sciences is a $75 Billion Industry in Texas Welcome to the second annual issue of Silicon Hills News’ print magazine focused on the expanding Life Sciences industry in Austin and San Antonio.

It’s truly amazing to see the growth in this industry locally during the last few decades. And to know that Texas is one of the leading states overall in the biotechnology industry. Who knows a cure for cancer could come from the Lone Star State. Startups are working on that right here, right now. The total economic impact of the industry in Texas is estimated at $75 billion annually, according to the Texas Healthcare & Bioscience Institute, an industry association.

In fact, Texas is home to “over 3,600 firms involved in biotechnology-related manufacturing, scientific research, and laboratory analysis. These firms employ more than 92,000 workers at an average annual salary of over $69,000,” according to a 2014 report from the governor’s office.

The amount of investment in local startups is on the rise too.

Targeted Technology, a San Antonio venture capital firm and Sante Ventures, a venture capital firm in Austin, both focus on investing in biomedical startups.

In this issue, you’ll read about a few of the innovative startups in our area ranging from UnaliWear, which makes the Kanega watch to monitor seniors to Invictus Medical which created the GELShield to protect newborn babies’ heads in the hospital. Xenex Disinfection Services created germ-zapping robots that eradicate harmful organisms in hospitals. Lots of medical technology startups locally are also focused on harnessing medical data including PotentiaMetrics, ePatient Finder and Capsenta Technologies. Others featured in this issue involve communications between doctors’ offices and patients including eRelevance and Filament Labs’ Patient IO. Lastly, we have bio briefs on significant news from both cities and we shine a spotlight on ten life sciences startups to watch in the coming year. And BioMed SA, an advocacy group for the biomedical industry in San Antonio, celebrates its 10th anniversary this year.

Thank you to Susan Lahey, Hojun Choi and Tim Green for writing articles for this issue and to John Davidson for taking portraits.

Also we wanted to thank our sponsors and advertisers that make this issue possible. A special thanks to the Texas State Small Business Development Center, BioMed SA, Akimbo, PotentiaMetrics, Austin Technology Council, the Austin Chamber of Commerce, Bank SNB, Strasburger Law Firm and Creative Civilization.

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Silicon Hills News Life Sciences Startups Second Annual Issue Index 1

– Overview of Central Texas’ Life Sciences Industry

2 3 to 4 6 to 7 8 10 to 11 13 to 14 16 to 17 19

– Index

21 22

– Filament Labs’ Patient.io – Ten Life Sciences Startups to Watch in Central Texas

23 to 24 – ePatientFinder 25 TO 26 – Invictus Medical 27 – 7 Bio-Briefs on the Life Sciences

– PotentiaMetrics – Targeted Technology – UnaliWear

Industry in Austin

– Capsenta Technologies

28

– Xenex

– 7 Bio-Briefs on the Life Sciences Industry in San Antonio

– eRelevance – BioMed SA Celebrates 10 Years of Promoting the Biomedical Industry in San Antonio

For more than 30 years, Strasburger attorneys have provided comprehensive, creative and costeffective legal services to clients in the health care industry. Our team members collaborate and take a 360-degree approach to assist physicians, hospitals, health care facilities, health systems and other organizations on matters relating to: BUSINESS AND TRANSACTIONS | OPERATIONAL AND REGULATORY ISSUES | REIMBURSEMENT SPECIALTY HEALTHCARE AREAS | INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY | LITIGATION AND ALTERNATIVE DISPUTE RESOLUTION

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PotentiaMetrics Aims to Improve Patient Care

By HOJUN CHOI, Special Contributor to Silicon Hills News

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ustin’s growing tech scene and vibrant entrepreneurial community convinced Robert Palmer, CEO and founder of PotentiaMetrics, to move his startup from St. Louis to Austin last year.

The company, developed through a partnership with the Office of Clinical Research Outcomes at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, does data analysis. It compares large sets of data and helps businesses and institutions make better sense of complex variables that need to be considered when evaluating patient care.

PotentiaMed, one of the startup’s featured products, collects patient data from multiple hospitals and hospital systems to help physicians come up with the best possible treatment options for their patients. Palmer said physicians have the difficult task of finding out the best solution for each patient, as many variables can affect how an illness affects the body.

Healthcare institutions have had tools that can make broad inferences about the institution’s patient population, Palmer said.

But those tools are limited in scope, and do not take into account the complex variables that set each of these patients apart from one another, he said.

“What our tools address is a more personalized view of healthcare,” Palmer said. “Because you don’t treat populations; you treat patients.”

In 2010, when PotentiaMetrics was still being developed, Palmer’s father was diagnosed with prostate cancer. The experience he had with his father, who passed away in 2011, is a motivating force behind the company.

“A lot of the challenge we dealt with in terms of deciding what treatment was best for my father drove me to create these tools so that others do not have to go through the same experience,” Palmer said.

Despite the doctor’s best intentions, Palmer said the lack of a technology that looked at patients’ conditions in a more personalized way largely led to their choosing a suboptimal treatment plan for his father.

PotentiaMetrics now offers a platform for healthcare professionals to compare more specific patient circumstances. Because this type of analysis takes large amounts of data for comparative analysis, one of the early challenges of the company was convincing healthcare systems to share their information, Palmer said.

“The basis is of our company is really around comparatives,” Palmer said. “In order to compare, the first thing we have to do through our outcomes products is to collect the data.”

The reputation of Washington University’s medical school helped open the lines of communication with other health institutions across Silicon Hills News 3

bootstrapping money. The company is now looking for institutional funds, largely to expand its marketing team, Palmer said.

“This isn’t going to be about selling as much as it is about marketing our product and letting people know its purpose,” Palmer said. “Our marketing approach will focus on making relationships with institutions.”

PotentiaMetrics’ current team has the technical and clinical background to supplement its marketing push. Todd Steussie, a former-NFL offensive lineman who was a part of the Carolina Panthers’ 2003 Superbowl team, has brought his experiences and connections from his career as a professional athlete to manage PotentiaPro, another platform offered by the company.

“One of the great things with my experience in the NFL is that they opened up a lot of doors for conversations with significant people in the industry,” Steussie said.

Without going into details, Steussie told Silicon Hills News that the company is in the process of pursuing a potentially groundbreaking deal with an organization with “close ties” to the professional football league.

Similar to PotentiaMed, the sport analysis platform takes granular statistics from professional sports teams, and with the help of experts in the industry, provides reports and analysis that can aid team owners and managers.

Robert Palmer, CEO and founder of PotentiaMetrics Photo by John Davidson

the country, Palmer said. Teaching hospitals, which make up a large portion of the startup’s current clientele, were more willing to share their data due to the startup’s partnership with the university, he said.

“A big part of why we receive data from participating institutions is that they want to know how they’re doing compared to other institutions,” Palmer said.

PotentiaMetrics takes a neutral stance in all of its analysis, and said that it does not release information that could help identify the source of a specific set of data, Palmer said. The service, in other words, is not designed to judge the quality of care at a hospital through a ranking system.

By providing information about how well a certain procedure or treatment is performing in relation to other methods, the service provides analysis on complex sets of data that could help even the best doctors with treatment decisions.

“There is no way that an unaided human mind can make these calculations, when you consider the many variables that make each patient different from one another, whether it’s gender, ethnicity or in many cases another condition,” Palmer said.

The startup, which officially launched in 2013, has closed a total of 12 contracts, all of which were obtained through referrals. Hospital systems, as well as medical technology companies, have chosen to use the company’s platform and services, which are sold through subscriptions.

PotentiaMetrics, which began its move to Austin earlier this year, has raised about $4 million through grants, strategic investors and 4

Silicon Hills News

“You can’t just go off box scores that are recorded,” Steussie said. “You have to think about the situations that affect the game, as well as the aspects of the game that inflates or deflates the data.”

Steussie, one of the 11 founders of the startup, said he met Palmer through a mutual connection while earning his MBA at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. Though it wasn’t easy, Steussie said that his successful transition from a professional athlete to an entrepreneur in the data analytics industry is deeply rooted in his love for putting in the work to meet the challenge at hand.

“You have to love the process,” Steussie said. “You go forward trusting that the patience and time that goes into a company will pay off, similar to the way that patience and time in the film room makes a difference on the field.”

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Targeted Technology Funds Life Sciences Startups in San Antonio

By LAURA LOREK, Reporter with Silicon Hills News

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ntrepreneurs in the life sciences industry in San Antonio for years complained about the lack of venture capital.

partner of Greer Capital Advisors, a venture capital fund. He now splits his time between his two houses in San Antonio and Birmingham.

In 2008, Paul Castella and Alan Dean, cofounders and senior managing partners of Targeted Technology, a venture capital firm based in San Antonio, decided to do something about that.

“It gives us a bigger geographic reach and both communities have a lot of activity in this area and they are underserved by venture funds,” Dean said.

“The quality of innovation we have here in San Antonio is really meaningful,” Castella said.

Previously, Dean served as director of technology transfer at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio. Castella shared office space with Dean at the university where Castella worked on his startup, CardioSpectra, founded in 2005. He served as co-founder and president. The company sold in 2007 to Volcano Corp. for $63 million.

To help fund ideas, Castella and Dean created the first $11.2 million Targeted Technology Fund and invested in 12 companies.

Since then, four of those companies have been sold. Its first investment, Vidacare sold to Teleflex for $262.5 million in 2013. Early investors made 4.2 times a return on their investment, Dean said.

ENTrigue Surgical sold to ArthroCare for $42 million in 2013.

More recently, in June, an Australian company, TFS Corp. bought ViroXis Corp. and Santalis Pharmaceuticals for a combined cash and stock deal initially worth $45.3 million.

“It was a very small fund,” Castella said. “We started it during the financial meltdown of 2008. We had our first close in 2009. We ended up with 12 companies in that portfolio and we’ve sold a third of them. All of the other investments are viable and potentially exit able.”

Targeted Technology also has investments in Birmingham, Alabama, because Dean moved there in 2006 to serve as managing 6

Silicon Hills News

Alan Dean (Left) and Paul Castella (Right) cofounders and senior managing partners of Targeted Technology, courtesy photos

Both Castella and Dean have extensive experience in the biotechnology and medical technology industry. They play “a critical role in growing and nurturing our local innovation ecosystem,” said Ann Stevens, president of BioMed SA. “The founders are life science entrepreneurs themselves and understand firsthand how the scarcity of local venture funding and the necessity for San Antonio entrepreneurs to raise money elsewhere was holding our life science sector back,” Stevens said.

In 2014, Targeted Technology launched its second fund with $42 million in venture capital. Many of the same investors from the first fund also participated in the second one, Dean said. It has made investments in nine companies so far and a few more currently undergoing due diligence that the company declined to disclose.

“We could certainly spend a lot more money than we have,” Castella said. “The second fund is $42 million and it’s all accounted for now. It only took us two years to spend $42 million. We could easily spend double that.”

Recently, Targeted Technology worked to attract Germanbased Cytocentrics Bioscience’s international headquarters to San Antonio. The company makes a medical device called a CytoPatch Machine. Its patch clamping technology evaluates drug interactions with human cells and analyzes data. The company has pledged to create 300 jobs and invest $15 million locally in the next eight years.

“The importance of Targeted Technology to the local ecosystem cannot be overstated,” Stevens said.

Targeted Technology invested in biotech serial entrepreneur Fred Dinger’s latest venture, Aerin Medical, an ear, nose and throat device company. The company is in the process of moving from California to Austin, where Dinger lives.

“Obviously we’re very keen on investing with Fred,” Castella said.

Dinger founded Osteobiologics, which sold to Smith and Nephew, then C2M Medical, which sold to Tornier and ENTrigue Surgical, which sold to ArthoCare.

Gabriele Niederauer, an executive who has worked with Dinger on a number of his startups, now serves as CEO of Bluegrass Vascular Technologies, another company in Targeted Technology’s portfolio, which moved from Kentucky to San Antonio.

“That’s what happens when you have a critical mass of biotech and life science companies – people move to another company,” Castella said. “A company gets bought and you still have trained skilled people and they tend to gravitate to entrepreneurial activities.“ Targeted Technology plans to raise a third fund in a few years.

“If you have a team that’s capable of working deals and has a focus not just on investing but all of the ancillary functions necessary to support a company it’s a good mechanism for attracting opportunities,” Castella said.

Targeted Technology’s longest investment is in Bio2 Medical, creators of the Angel Catheter to protect critically ill patients from Pulmonary Embolism. Its average investment is about five years, Castella said.

“A lot of the companies we invest in have very significant technology in the sense that they have the potential to radically improve healthcare,” Castella said. “Vidacare was a life saving device that changed EMS. Bio2 is a device that will have a huge impact on hospital patient outcomes. Bluegrass is focused on vein access and Cytocentrics will open up a whole new avenue of drug research.”

Even though Targeted Technology is in South Texas the area is not shortchanged for transformational technologies, Castella said.

“In San Antonio, it’s been more of an organic, grinding path to get things going,” Dean said. “But it starts building on itself.”

Targeted Technology is also working to create a biotech accelerator and incubator in San Antonio. Birmingham has Innovation Depot, founded eight years ago, which has more than 100 companies today, Dean said.

“San Antonio could benefit from a similar program,” Castella said.

“We are willing to work to help develop one of those here.”

“Our next fund we would like it to be much larger because the opportunities are here and they’re growing,” Dean said.

A group from San Antonio visited the Innovation Depot in Birmingham recently to learn from the activity there.

“It creates its own momentum,” Castella said. “We support ideas that originate here. But truthfully most of what we’ve done is bring ideas in. That’s a function of having a venture fund this stage, which is fairly rare. A small amount of money can attract in significant opportunities.”

Targeted Technology, with eight employees, has eight companies working out of its office in the Stone Oak area. They are all fund investments and they are focused on changing the world, Dean said.

Targeted Technology has brought companies in from Kentucky, Canada, California, Ohio, Houston, Birmingham and Australia.

“We want to make money for our investors but we really, really appreciate that we’re in the space where we save lives or improve lives with our technology,” Dean said. “This is more than just a job.”

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UnaliWear Makes Smartwatches for Older Adults

By LAURA LOREK, Reporter with Silicon Hills News

J

oan Hall worked as a model most of her life.

Now she’s 81 and lives independently in San Antonio.

Her daughter, Jean Anne Booth, who lives in Austin, wanted to keep tabs on her mom and make sure she is ok but her mom refused to wear one of those elder alert buttons.

“They’re just plain ugly,” Hall told her daughter.

And those emergency response help buttons are socially stigmatizing and limits the wearers to their homes, she said.

That’s when Jean Anne Booth, an engineer and serial entrepreneur, decided to come up with a better solution. She left retirement to start UnaliWear. Booth sold her last company to Texas Instruments and the one before that to Apple.

“I wanted to build something that my mother and I both would be willing to wear to remain safe as we age,” Booth said.

For the past few years, Booth has been working with a small team of engineers to create prototypes of a senior alert watch. And she’s been conducting focus groups. She created a classically styled watch that doesn’t require a smartphone to operate. Now they’re ready to begin a beta trial with the product, called the Kanega watch. It has built-in cellular, Wi-Fi and GPS capabilities. It also has an accelerometer for fall detection, and continuous speech to provide an active medical alert that works anywhere, in combination with data-driven artificial intelligence that learns the wearer’s lifestyle.

“We build the cell phone into the watch because less than 10 percent of seniors 75 and older have smartphones,” Booth said.

The Austin-based startup, previously known as LifeAssist, changed its name to UnaliWear because “Unalii” is the Cherokee word for “friend,” Booth said. And “Kanega” means speak, so were the “friend who speaks to you,” she said.

Focus groups have also called the Kanega watch as “OnStar for Seniors.” The watch’s built in voice recognition software responds to the name that the owner gives it and operates on voice commands instead of buttons. Booth’s mom named her watch “Fred Astaire.”

It has all the features of a regular watch including time and date features in large print. The watch can also let a senior live an active lifestyle because it goes wherever they go and it works around the clock, Booth said. If the person wearing the watch has an accident, the watch monitors activity so it can call operators for help.

UnaliWear recently completed a successful Kickstarter campaign.

The company raised $110,000, 10 percent above its goal, from 306 backers.

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Silicon Hills News

The response to UnaliWear’s Kickstarter campaign shows a demand exists for easy to use monitoring devices for older adults.

In fact, a Nielsen Co. report on aging last year showed the number one concern among older adults is about losing self-reliance to care for basic needs.

For a long time, the wearables market seemed to ignore the aging population. They created exercise monitors and other devices to increase fitness and health. But it wasn’t until recently wearables aimed at seniors began to appear.

Today, the Kanega watch faces competition from companies like Lively, Evermind and BeClose. The companies generally charge $50 to $300 for the device and then monthly monitoring fees starting at around $30 a month.

The market for monitoring devices for seniors is $1.5 billion annually in the U.S. at least, said Laurie Orlov, an aging in place expert and a longtime technology veteran and analyst.

“Consider that 46 percent of women aged 75 and up live alone – they would like to feel safe at home and when they are out and about,” Orlov said.

And many seniors take multiple prescription medications that can lead to confusion and other side effects if taken incorrectly, Booth said. So the ability to monitor medications is a huge benefit to the Kanega watch, she said.

UnaliWear’s Kanega watch is still in beta testing and isn’t yet available on the mass market. Those supporters who pledged in the Kickstarter campaign will get the first devices.

“We’ve recently built our fifth prototype,” Booth said. “We’re doing a friends and family test. That’s where we are today.”

UnaliWear is testing one more prototype and expects to be in the market in 2016, she said. The watch costs $299 for the device with activation fee and $35 to $85 a month in monitoring fees.

So far, Booth has raised just $1.1 million in seed stage funding.

All of her marketing has been through the Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign. And she was recently featured in a Time Magazine article on smartwatches for seniors.

“What we’re building works,” Booth said. “We’re allowing seniors to have independence with dignity.”

AdvAnced Technologies TodAy for a Healthier Tomorrow Thanks to the Austin Chamber’s Innovate Austin initiative, we are creating a region of both established and emerging companies that are changing the face of healthcare today for a healthier tomorrow.

To learn more about how Innovate Austin is supporting the growth of Austin’s life science cluster and to get involved in this game changing innovation evolution, go to austinchamber.com/innovation and sign up for our innovation & entrepreneurship newsletter.

Capsenta Technologies

By HOJUN CHOI, Special Contributor to Silicon Hills News

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nyone familiar with the University of Texas at Austin is no stranger to the words “what happens here changes the world.”

To Capsenta, a spin out smart data startup from a UT computer science lab, that motto is more than just a rallying call to donors and fans of the university.

The company, which officially launched in July, seeks to change the way companies around the world mine databases for information. It offers a data translation and integration software allowing its customers to combine and analyze relational databases in a faster and more economic and efficient way.

Traditionally, when combining relational databases for analysis, businesses complete a three-step process involving extracting data from current locations, transforming the data so it is consistent and searchable and loading the data into a newly created warehouse or repository. David Arnold, Capsenta’s co-founder and CEO, said the tedious process, known as ETL, is costly and time consuming.

Capsenta’s patented technology replaces this process, using an application called Ultrawrap, software developed at UT’s Miranker Laboratory.

“There was a need to bring forward these tools, which whole industries were built on, to better weave and integrate with a new world of data,” Arnold said.

Juan Sequeda, who completed his Ph.D in computer science in May, developed the platform under the mentorship of Daniel P. Miranker, the lab’s namesake.

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“The process of integrating databases could be done manually, but these were processes that turned out to be inefficient and vulnerable to human error,” Sequeda said.

Another weakness of the traditional process, Sequeda said, was not all relational databases were built to be easily combined with one another.

Using their collective knowledge and experience with what is referred to as “semantic web” technology, Sequeda and Miranker designed software to “wrap” around database warehouses from multiple sources so it can be analyzed and cross referenced without being moved.

What brings these databases together, Sequeda said, is a layer of “semantic” technology filling gaps between existing relational databases, which allows Ultrawrap to address specific queries companies may have.

Ultrawrap not only streamlines data integration through its automated process, it also saves users time and money by not requiring them to repeat the ETL process every time a specific question needs to be answered.

Miranker, who is listed as a co-founder of the company along with Sequeda and Arnold, had a hand in smoothing out the licensing process with the university, which owns equity in the company. He said Arnold and Darren Selsky joined the company in 2014 after first serving as advisors to the project at the Austin Technology Incubator.

“A lot of that gap stems from the technologies we currently have and don’t have to unlock the data that is already out there.”

Actionable intelligence, in the world of big data, lets companies and organizations know whether or not they should make changes based on the copious amount of information in their data warehouses.

He said MedAxiom, which serves 320 organizations and more than 6,000 physicians in the cardiovascular health industry, provides a hub for sharing and benchmarking data to help these healthcare providers evaluate and improve upon their performance.

Though the company has used more traditional methods to combine and analyze large databases for more than a decade, Graver said the Ultrawrap solution helps create a marketplace in which these organizations and physicians can gain access to this knowledge in a more efficient way.

“The Austin Technology Incubator was largely responsible for the matchmaking with our business team,” Miranker said.

Arnold and Selsky both have backgrounds with close ties to health information and technology. Selsky, who has spent his entire career in the health IT industry, said his work with information connectivity within hospital systems has helped him recognize Ultrawrap’s applicability in the healthcare industry.

“Data that big companies have always been stored, but aren’t necessarily available in a form can be shared and used to increase the quality of care,” Selsky said.

MedAxiom, an information resource and service provider for cardiology organizations, began using the startup’s data integration platform in April. Ryan Graver, president of MedAxiom Ventures, is responsible for creating relationships between its members and other industry segments, such as health IT, medical device and pharmaceutical companies.

“Consistently, we hear that ‘actionable intelligence’ is really probably the biggest area in which we see a gap in the industry,” Graver said.

“We can use Capsenta’s technology to better pinpoint patients who have certain health conditions and ensure that these patients are receiving the proper care,” Graver said.

The majority of the startup’s customers have been related to the health industry, many of which are in the medical device business.

The software has, however, proved to be functional in other realms, such as legal and transportation.

“You try not to get distracted with going too broad too fast because it dilutes your focus and it dilutes your ability to build great examples of what your technology can do within a vertical market,” Arnold said.

Arnold said the startup, with seven employees, is preparing to raise additional funds. It has already raised about $750,000 in seed stage financing, Arnold said.

Because the company’s business model does not require a large customer service team, Arnold said it looks to add to its sales and marketing team, largely to expand into other markets in and outside the healthcare industry.

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Xenex

Sees Big Market for Germ Zapping Robots

Mark Stibich, PhD, founder of Xenex and Morris Miller, CEO of Xenex Photo by Gary Hartman

By LAURA LOREK, Reporter with Silicon Hills News

X

enex’s germ zapping robots eradicate dangerous bacteria and viruses leading to lower cases of infectious diseases in the nation’s hospitals, according to several studies.

“On a daily basis we are cleaning 5,000 to 7,000 rooms,” said Morris Miller, CEO of Xenex.

Xenex created a mobile robot that looks like R2D2. It rolls into a hospital room. Everyone then vacates and the robot extends its light tower and starts sending out pulsating ultraviolet rays to kill viruses, bacteria, mold, fungus and bacterial spores. It only takes five to ten minutes to clean a room and it kills germs on 99.9 percent of the surfaces including under beds, in the folds of shades or curtains, light switches, doorknobs and floors. Each robot can disinfect 30 to 62 rooms per day.

The robots destroy the microorganisms that cause Hospital Acquired Infections, known as HAIs. And getting an infection in a hospital is a huge problem.

In fact, the Centers for Disease Control released a study, based on a large sample of U.S. acute care hospitals, that found on any given day about one in 25 hospital patients has at least one healthcare-associated infection. In 2011, 722,000 patients in the U.S. acquired an infection in a hospital and 75,000 patients died as a result of an infection they acquired during their hospitalizations.

Today, more than 300 hospitals, Veterans Affairs facilities, skilled nursing facilities, ambulatory surgery centers and long-term acute care facilities in the U.S. use Xenex robots.

The biotech startup gathers data from all of its robots in hospitals and other facilities nationwide and keeps a running tab displayed on a giant screen at its San Antonio headquarters.

That data is key to showing hospitals how effective the robots can be in reducing infections in healthcare facilities that own one, Miller said.

In July, a new report from the Westchester Medical Center in Valhalla, New York, showed the hospital reduced Clostridium difficile, known as C.diff infection rates in its intensive care unit by 70 percent by using the Xenex robot to disinfect rooms.

Another study, done by the Orlando Health South Seminole Hospital in Florida reported a 61 percent decrease in MRSA, VRE and C.diff, in its intensive care unit and a 41 percent decrease in C.diff infections facility-wide resulting from deploying the Xenex robot to disinfect its facility. The hospital reported the reduction in infections saved the facility $730,000 during a 22 month period.

In San Antonio, Morningside Ministries at The Manor, a long-term care facility, also reported a nearly 77 percent decrease in C.diff infections after they began using a Xenex robot to clean rooms.

Overall, hospitals that purchased Xenex robots have reported greater than 50 percent decreases in Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus Aureus, known as MRSA, Miller said.

“This is a bigger problem than Polio was at the time and we’re determined to solve it,” Miller said.

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Modern Healthcare, the leader in healthcare news, research and data, estimated the market for disinfection robots at $30 million in 2014 soaring to $80 million by 2017.

Xenex recently expanded its sales to Spain, Ireland and the United Kingdom, Miller said.

Globally, people are concerned about antibiotic resistance and the spread of deadly viruses like MERS and Ebola, Miller said.

Xenex is also expanding its sales force in the United States, Miller said. Xenex is also looking at the application of its disinfection system outside the hospital.

“We’ve had different requests for different versions and we’re researching how to do that,” Miller said. “We’ve designed something that can easily be used in a cruise ship, nursery school or gym lockers.”

In January, Xenex, which is privately held, raised $25 million in venture capital for product development, international expansion and to hire more employees. The company currently has around 100 employees. To date, Xenex has raised about $54 million.

“I shouldn’t be going to sleep until we’re in every single healthcare facility in the U.S.,” Miller said. Every year, patients get infections and 75,000 are dying, he said. About. 70 percent wouldn’t get the infection if Xenex robots disinfected the facilities, he said.

Getting the hospitals educated about the abilities of Xenex’s robots effectiveness in disinfecting rooms is one of the main focuses of the company, Miller said. There’s some confusion in the market because Xenex competes against 59 companies that sell a mercury-bulb-based disinfection system that isn’t as effective, he said.

Yet Xenex is so confident its robots will reduce infection at healthcare facilities that use it, the company offers an infection reduction guarantee, Miller said. It provides a full refund if in the first 12 months of use customers do not save enough money to pay for the $105,000 robot.

A hospital that has a germ-zapping robot also sees a competitive advantage in the marketplace, Miller said. Because patients can now use a website called Hospitalcompare.hhs.gov to investigate and compare hospital acquired infection rates, he said.

“Eventually they are going to say to their doctor I don’t want to get my surgery done there because their infection rates are too high,” Miller said.

Some of the hospitals that have purchased the robots have created billboards and commercials with them. They’ve also used social media to host naming contests for the robot.

“It’s a real differentiator,” Miller said.

Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas used its Xenex robot to disinfect after a patient died from Ebola and two nurses became infected with Ebola last year. The hospital has two Xenex robots.

The Ebola infection in the U.S. helped to fuel demand for the Xenex robots, according to the company.

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Even with the best janitorial staff, studies show that 32 percent of the surfaces in a room don’t get clean, Miller said. Xenex is the tool to solve the problem, he said.

“We know it works, its proven to work, it pays itself back to the hospital,” Miller said.

Miller, a serial entrepreneur, previously co-founded Rackspace. In 2008, he invested in Xenex. He also became its CEO and moved its headquarters and manufacturing operations from Austin to San Antonio.

“Sometimes you feel very excited about a business,” Miller said.

With Xenex, the startup is focused on saving lives, he said.

“It’s a bundle of proven potential that as the market hears about it and discovers it, it will be kind of like magic,” Miller said.

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02/19

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Photo: Robert Fabbio, founder of eRelevance, photo by John Davidson

eRelevance Creates DocWithMe App and Plans to Tackle Other Industries

By HOJUN CHOI, Special Contributor to Silicon Hills News

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obert Fabbio and his band of seasoned entrepreneurs at eRelevance first envisioned a mobile application to help doctors better interact with their patients after treatment, but, around this vision, developed a marketing strategy to make ripples beyond just the healthcare industry.

“When we first started, we were all about a mobile application,“ said Michael Cohen, vice president of marketing. “What we realized is that that’s not always how the world works; an app might not be for everybody.”

Cohen said the team initially wanted to offer healthcare providers a better way to communicate with patients through a digital platform to simulate some doctor-patient conversations take place during an appointment.

After realizing the application’s potential as an interactive marketing tool, however, Cohen said the company rebranded itself from a patient engagement service into a marketing agency.

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“What we found is if you can engage people around the services of a practice when they’re choosing to have that particular conversation, the more likely it is that they go on to request care for that specific need,” Cohen said.

Because the mobile application, DocWithMe, only tries to engage users after they have selected to find out more about a specific health service, Cohen said the communication the app fosters is a unique channel other more traditional marketing solutions have not yet used to the best of its capability.

media campaigns have been effective. She said the service has given her clinic a way to engage patients consistently.

Fabbio, the CEO of the company, realizes the service’s strength as a patient engagement platform. He said eRelevance, however, can take interactive marketing to new level.

“Ultimately what we have built is far more than a patient engagement service,” Fabbio said. “We have essentially built a next generation conversational marketing platform.”

The company reached out to doctors and healthcare providers in the elective healthcare industry to find out what they were interested in finding out about their patients as well as how they have done in the past to engage former patients. Doing so, Cohen said, helped the agency design content to best mirror a doctor-patient conversation.

Fabbio said the agency, which launched in 2013, has closed more than 120 accounts in two quarters of selling. He also told Silicon Hills News the company has raised about $2.7 million in seed funding, and has grown from its three original founders to 16 employees, mostly to expand its sales team.

The application, for example, may ask whether the user has recently been on vacation and move onto a conversation about sun damage to the skin. The user can then choose to learn more about offers dealing with sun damage, engage the subject at a later time or move on to a different topic.

The company currently targets elective health care practices in the healthcare industry across the country, a large number of them being medical spa clinics. Its interactive marketing service is offered through 6-month and 12-month contracts.

Doctors using the marketing service can offer the mobile application to their patients, who can only use the application after a verification process. He said the interactions taking place through the platform will not be shared with outside parties, recognizing the private and often sensitive nature of doctor-patient conversations.

“We don’t share what we’re learning about people to other marketing firms, but doctors can use our services to see what types of topics their patients are interested in,” Cohen said.

Though he recognized the importance of making impressions through social media and email notifications -services the company now offers in addition to the mobile application, Cohen said the company’s experience shows reaching out to patients through a conversation generated more leads than other channels.

“We’re doing all the creative work, we’re doing all the content as well as the technology to run that content,” Cohen said. “We’re doing all of that for them while they can sit back and focus on giving quality care to their patients.”

As a part of their service, the marketing startup also takes account of how patients are choosing to find out about services, whether they to do so through the agency’s texting service, email notification or social media posts. Doing so, Cohen said, allows their clients to have an easier time reaching out to these patients for future appointments.

Corina Ianculovici, who began using eRelevance’s service a year ago, said the company’s marketing strategy has been a “game changer” for her medispa clinic in New Jersey. Though she said she has yet to see the service generate new leads, Ianculovici said the multichannel approach is great at keeping her current leads active.

“We found that plastic surgeons, dermatologists and other health services that provide elective care are constantly looking to generate more leads for business,” Fabbio said.

Fabbio said the company plans on using this same conversational approach to reach different markets both in and outside the healthcare industry. He said with each new industry, the agency will use an application similar to DocWithMe to supplement its marketing campaigns.

“It’s a real basic white label app that is configured to look like as if these doctors or hospital systems have created their own app, so we’ll be able to configure a similar app for different industries,” Fabbio said.

Fabbio said it is still too early to estimate when the company’s expansion into different industries may happen. Tim Smith, one of the founders of the company and its director of products, said the company will be well prepared to adapt to a different market once it is ready to make the move.

“We have the science, we know what model to follow, we have the code and the back end that will run all this,” Smith said. “We just need to adapt the content and adapt the application a little bit and it will work.”

Fabbio, who has more than 25 years experience as an entrepreneur, has created over $1.5 billion in shareholder value at time of exit for the ventures he has been a part of.

“I think there is great money to be made and great change to be had in the intersection of healthcare and information technology,” Fabbio said. “I have classically been an IT guy, and the ability to bring tech to healthcare is sort of my sweetspot.”

“Patient engagement through previous sources we used was ineffective because of the low email opening rate,” Ianculovici said. “Patients were aggravated when we used a text messaging application like CallFire.”

Ianculovici said she has seen higher patient engagement with eRelevance’s mobile application, and said the company’s social Silicon Hills News 17

BioMed SA 10 Years

By LAURA LOREK, Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Ann Stevens, president of BioMed SA, courtesy photo

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en years ago, a group of leaders in San Antonio, led by former Mayor Henry Cisneros and the Greater San Antonio Chamber of Commerce, created an advocacy organization for the city’s biomedical industry.

They founded BioMed SA with the core mission to raise the visibility of San Antonio’s sizable biomedical industry locally, statewide, nationally and internationally.

“We’ve gained considerable traction in the last few years,” said Ann Stevens, BioMed SA’s president.

During the last decade, the organization’s mission has evolved to include economic development, Stevens said.

In 2009, Medtronic selected San Antonio for its new Diabetes Therapy Management & Education Center with plans to create 1,400 jobs. San Antonio beat out more than 900 other cities for the project and BioMed SA played an important role in convincing the company to locate here, Stevens said.

“EDF (The San Antonio Economic Development Foundation) had been working on it for more than a year,” Stevens said. “In the final stages, they asked BioMed SA to come into the project and help them land it.”

Since then, BioMed SA has worked closely with the EDF to bring new businesses here and to retain the ones that are here as well as foster new startups.

“We believe we are bringing real value by not only our promotional activities, but we’re beginning to attract outside investments to the city,” Stevens said.

In addition, the local startup scene in the life sciences industry is growing, Stevens said. The entrepreneurial side of the life sciences industry fosters new companies, attracts venture capital, brings seasoned executives to the city and helps the overall ecosystem to grow, she said.

Just recently, Targeted Technology, a locally based venture capital fund, brought Cytocentrics Bioscience, a Rostock, Germany-based biotech company, to San Antonio. The company agreed to relocate its corporate headquarters to San Antonio and create 15 jobs by the end of the year. In June, the City of San Antonio granted Cytocentrics $1 million in economic development funds to attract the company, which has pledged to create 285 additional jobs in the next eight years and invest $15 million.

The company will be based initially at 18618 Tuscany Stone.

Cytocentrics makes a medical device called a CytoPatch Machine.

The company’s patch clamping technology evaluates drug interactions with human cells and analyzes data.

In addition to biomedical startups relocating here, one of the trends locally is to focus on technology transfer by taking academic research out of local institutions like the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio and the University of Texas at San Antonio and spinning that technology out into startups, Stevens said.

On the startup front, Invictus Medical, which makes a cranial support device for the heads of newborn babies, is a prime example of a spin off coming out of the University of Texas at San Antonio, Stevens said. Other startups spinning out of the Health Science Center include Astrocyte Pharmaceuticals, which is developing drugs for brain injuries, and Rapamycin Holdings, a drug development company focused on disease prevention and treatment in pets and humans.

Randy Goldsmith, who heads up Rapamycin, also runs The Texas Technology Development Center, known as T3DC, and hosts a quarterly luncheon to keep everyone informed on what’s going on in the biomedical industry in San Antonio. About 200 people attend the luncheon, which features company presentations.

“By working together and raising visibility we have attracted more economic activity including a lot of activity in entrepreneurial startups and retained our hometown business,” Stevens said.

To continue to move the life sciences industry forward, BioMed SA plans to pursue new revenue sources from foundations, corporate grants and donations from individuals, said BioMed SA Chairman Ken Trevett.

A few of BioMed SA’s key accomplishments in its first 10 years include the creation of the annual Julio Palmaz Award for Innovation in Healthcare and Biosciences. The next award, now in its 10th year, will go to W.E. Moerner, PhD, a San Antonio native and winner of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He will receive the award at BioMed SA’s annual award dinner in San Antonio on September 10th.

BioMed SA also recently completed a two-year Asset Initiative to identify “five key disease areas in which San Antonio has biomedical assets and expertise of national or world-class caliber.” That information is being used to promote San Antonio to researchers and companies in those areas and helped attract the World Stem Cell Summit to San Antonio last December.

San Antonio’s healthcare and bioscience industry employs nearly one of every six members of the city’s workforce and has an annual economic impact exceeding $30 billion, according to BioMed SA.

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Revolutionizing the

Evidence of Evidence-based Medicine

We build platforms to support comparative effectiveness analysis and improve healthcare outcomes.

www.potentiamed.com

Colin Anawaty (left) and Jason Bornhorst (right) cofounders of Patient.io and Filmament Labs, courtesy photos

App puts patients and providers on the same page

By TIM GREEN, Reporter with Silicon Hills News

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orinthian Health operates 20 centers where patients get critical intravenous drug treatments for chronic neurological and autoimmune diseases.

The monthly sessions of infusions can last up to eight hours.

If the patient isn’t properly prepared or the complex drug mix is off, the patient can suffer significant side effects such as severe headaches and nausea. If worse comes to worst, the patient might have to give up the treatments.

To help patients manage their preparation and monitor conditions between treatments, Texas-based Corinthian has turned to a smartphone app called Patient IO developed by Austin startup Filament Labs.

The patients who use the app have done away with the packets of paper of care instructions and guidelines the doctor sent home with them and phone calls with their care team.

Bornhorst brings the experience of a serial entrepreneur to Filament Labs. When he was a student at the University of Michigan he started several companies. One, Mobiata, was bought by Expedia and still develops all of the company’s mobile travel apps.

Forbes noticed the healthcare turn, putting Bornhorst on its list of “30 Under 30” in healthcare for 2015.

Filament was selected for the first class of Techstars Austin on the basis of its fitness app, called Healthspark. The app would send reminders to users about exercise. The company even had a deal for the Aetna insurance company to distribute the app to its policyholders.

However, the app met the same fate as a Fitbit stuck in a sock drawer or a treadmill used as a clothes rack. Encouraging fitness, it turned out, was not a sustainable business.

Bornhorst said they needed some convincing to switch gears.

“We got dragged into changing the app.”

Instead they get reminders on their phones about drinking enough water and taking their meds. Corinthian’s staff can check in with their patients and the patients can quickly notify the staff when they have headaches or other problems. The app also has a library of medically vetted information about the patient’s disease.

Austin entrepreneur Josh Kerr was one of Filament’s mentors in Techstars and he and other mentors consulted with Bornhorst and Anawaty about pivoting.

Bucky Staggs, Corinthian’s science liaison, said the information flow between provider and patient enables them to work together effectively to improve care.

“Both Jason and Colin wanted the same thing out of this company,” Kerr said. “They shared all the right core values. They both believed in the same end goal and were motivated by all the right reasons. They had complimentary skills and the resources they would need to be successful.”

“It’s the biggest innovation I’ve seen in management for chronic disease patients,” said Staggs, who’s been a registered nurse for nearly 30 years. “It has absolutely improved the quality of care that we deliver to these chronic patients every time we see them.”

He said it’s essential to have a two-way bridge between patient and staff.

“For example, if we know you’re having side effects we can modify your next infusion to prevent that from happening again,” he said.

Filament co-founders Jason Bornhorst, the company’s chief executive, and Colin Anawaty, the chief product officer, created the app out of the ashes of a previous fitness-related venture. They’ve found more interest and money in the digital healthcare business.

Patient IO is part of a wave of digital health products responding to health care changes that hold providers more accountable for patient outcomes and that encourage patients to take active roles in their treatments.

Filament expects annual revenue of $1 million this year. It’s raised $1.5 million in seed rounding funding from Corinthian Health and Arcadia, another customer, as well as Mercury Fund, Techstar Ventures, Geekdom Fund and a number of angels. Bornhorst said the company plans to seek Series A funding in the first quarter of 2016.

Refocused, Bornhorst and Anawaty and their team went to work.

“It was no trivial thing,” Bornhorst said. “We totally rebuilt the platform.”

Kerr said that from his point of view, Bornhorst and Anawaty worked through some tough times together, but emerged with a much stronger company targeting a much bigger market.

Filament’s staff of 10, builds out and markets the app, working out of a building populated by other startups and tech companies. The team has many of its meetings at nearby Sweetish Hill Bakery.

Today, the app has thousands of users across 25 clinical sites, Bornhorst said.

The Corinthian site in San Antonio has a group of patients that pass on Patient IO’s benefits to fellow patients, Staggs said.

“Patients who use it and understand the value are talking to their fellow patients,” he said. ”Our internal growth (of the app) is from current users advocating to fellow patients.”

That’s accountability Filament likes.

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Ten Life Sciences Companies to Watch in Central Texas

By LAURA LOREK, Reporter with Silicon Hills News

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exas is one of the leading biotech states in the country, according to a 2014 report from the Texas Governor’s Office. In fact, it ranks second for employment of life and physical scientists nationwide.

The state has more than 3,600 biotechnology manufacturing and research and development firms. More than 92,000 people work for biotech companies in Texas. It has also become a hotbed of activity for startups tackling big problems like finding drugs to combat different types of cancer or medical devices to screen for cancer. San Antonio and Austin have dozens of innovative startups addressing big problems in the medical industry. Here are just ten to keep an eye on in the coming year: Aeglea Biotherapeutics: the Austin-based startup develops variants on human enzymes to deplete key amino acids to fight cancer and other diseases. The company filed in June with the Nasdaq Stock Exchange for an Initial Public Offering to raise $86.2 million.

Aerin Medical: the company is in the process of relocating its headquarters from California to Austin. Fred Dinger, a serial biomedical entrepreneur, is heading it up as CEO in Austin. It also just filed a Form D with the Securities and Exchange Commission to raise $14.36 million in funding. The company focuses on solving breathing problems. It has created a device that opens up the air passages of patients so they no longer need breathe right devices or surgery to breathe easier. The procedure is done in the doctor’s office.

Bluegrass Vascular Technologies – the San Antonio-based startup relocated from Lexington, Kentucky. It raised $4.5 million in Series A financing last year led by the Targeted Technology Fund of San Antonio. The company makes the Surfacer, a central venous access catheter system. Gabriele Niederauer joined the company in September of 2014 as its CEO and President.

Chiron Health – the Austin-based startup provides telemedicine healthcare consultation for doctors with patients remotely over the Internet. With the Chiron Health platform, doctors can review lab results, 22 Silicon Hills News

adjust medication and answer other patient questions online. Founded by Andrew O’Hara, the company is working with 20 health care providers.

ENTVantage Diagnostics: the Austin-based startup is creating a test to detect bacterial sinusitis, which requires antibiotics to cure. The test is similar to a strep throat test administered in the doctor’s office.

Mirna Therapeautics, the Austin-based startup develops cancer-fighting drugs. Its drugs are currently in clinical trial testing with patients. It recently received $41.8 million in venture capital financing. The company has raised $82.8 million in four rounds from 11 investors, according to its Crunchbase profile. Dr. Paul Lammers is the company’s CEO and president.

Neurolink Medical: the San Antonio-based startup has created a brain implant system to monitor brain activity and to directly deliver drugs to treat brain seizures or epilepsy. It received $3.2 million from the Texas Emerging Technology Fund.

Savara Pharmaceuticals: the Austin-based pharmaceutical startup has created pulmonary therapeutics for cancer and other diseases. It received $1.9 million from the Texas Emerging Technology Fund. To date, the company has raised $47.7 million in eight rounds.

Seno Medical Instruments: the San Antonio-based medical device startup has created laser optic technology to screen for cancer.

It received $2 million from the Texas Emerging Technology Fund.

StemBioSys: the San Antonio-based startup develops proprietary stem cell technologies for the regenerative medical market. Earlier this year, the company closed on $8 million in Series A funding led by the Targeted Technology Fund, a San Antoniobased venture capital firm. To date, it has raised $10 million. The company is in research partnerships with the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, the University of Texas at San Antonio and the Langer/Anderson Laboratories at MIT.

ePatientFinder Mines Data to Match Patients to the Right Clinical Trials

By SUSAN LAHEY, Reporter with Silicon Hills News

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ccording to a study by Tufts University in 2014, 60-to-80 percent of the cost of any new drug or treatment goes to clinical trials, and most of that is money is channeled into luring in, then weeding out patients to test the drug. They have to have the exact combination of age, health status, family history and dozens of other factors to make the clinical trials valid. That’s what ePatientFinder, a startup in Austin, was created to deal with.

The ePatientFinder platform data mines physicians’ and hospitals’ medical records looking for keywords that would mark a patient as a good candidate for a phase III trial—the kind where people actually benefit from the treatment, rather than just being used to measure things like toxicity. If candidates are found, their primary physicians, who are signed up with ePatientFinder, contact the patients to tell them of the opportunity and further screen them to determine if they are, in fact, a good fit.

“I come from an academic institution where I had colleagues or friends doing research all the time, looking for patients to enroll in studies,” said Dr. Gary Goff, an internist in Dallas who is signed up with ePatientFinder.

“There was no efficiency in it. It was like ‘Hey buddy, so and so, you have that disease. Would you be interested in talking to them? That was the mechanism of patient referrals-- posters on a tripod all over campus.

This is light years ahead of anything that’s been done before.”

The pharmaceutical companies pay ePatientFinder as well as the trial participants and doctors who screen and consult with patients. But it’s a lot more streamlined than trying to fish from the general population.

“If you look at areas like banking and communication it’s been a lot easier to automate because you’re dealing with less information,” said Tom Dorsett, ePatientFinder CEO and co-founder. Dorsett

Tom Dorsett, ePatient Finder CEO and cofounder, courtesy photo

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founded NuScribe, the market’s first health information exchange, in 1991 and sold it for $9 million. Dorsett used some of the proceeds of that sale to launch ePatientFinder. ePatientFinder works with most of the technologies healthcare practices use to manage patient records. And, Dorsett said, it’s the only one that involves the primary care physician rather than appealing directly to the patients. While he said the company is focused on chronic illnesses right now, such as diabetes, which are the subject of a lot of research, Dr. Goff suggested that the platform’s data mining capabilities has other uses, such as monitoring preventive health measures for various patients with similar profiles.

Dorsett, who has had several jobs in medical IT consulting and management since the sale of his company, had been looking for another opportunity with friend and former business partner Tom Tauzin of Tauzin Consultants in Washington, D.C.. Tauzin’s father, and business partner, a former Congressman from Louisiana, also served as president of PhRMA, the pharmaceutical association. They had discussed an idea Dorsett had years ago when his daughter was born with a large birthmark and was interested in what kinds of treatments were available. The idea for a clinical trial clearinghouse through primary physicians was initially created then.

“What we needed was a very large VHR (Virtual Health Record Clinical Portal) to access PHI (patient health information) efficiently,” Tauzin said. “We shelved it for some time…until the data showed that there was enough adoption that we could make a go of it from an investor standpoint…. Our model is solving big problems not that, necessarily, are unsolved but that could just be so onerous … that there’s a real cost barrier and hindrance to the industry.”

The cost of bringing treatments to market was one such problem.

Tauzin and Dorsett had to consult with numerous attorneys and other consultants to ensure that the platform they were proposing was legal and met with regulatory restrictions such as patient privacy laws. Tauzin’s company is also launching an accelerator Impact Acceleration, a venture building incubator/accelerator focused on energy, healthcare, telecommunications and technology.

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In addition to the exorbitant cost of finding patients, Dorsett said, “Most patients are completely unaware that these trials are going on. There’s a miniscule part of the population who will go out and look for clinical trials, and there are so many good treatments out there for diabetes, interesting things happening in Alzheimer’s, all the usual suspects drive the cost up in healthcare….” There are, he said some 17-odd-thousand trials running at any given point and they can be found at Clinicaltrials.gov. But ePatientFinder is able to sort out those that are showing the most promise in different therapeutic areas.

“Eighty six percent of clinical trials run behind because they’re looking for a diabetic, with another condition and 30 different data points,” he said. Researchers may ask a friend who is a physician if they can send patients over, but the physician, who is already busy, has no way of identifying the best patients other than combing through records. “What we do is automate all that so that community physicians can refer patients to clinical trials in their own community conducted by other physicians they know and trust in the community. Otherwise those treatments are completely inaccessible to those patients. We make it exist for them.”

Invictus Medical Sells a Device to Help Newborn Babies

By LAURA LOREK, Reporter with Silicon Hills News

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nvictus Medical is a homegrown San Antonio biomedical startup focused on improving the lives of newborns.

In 2010, Daniel Mendez, Israel Cruz and Nicholas Flores, all engineering undergraduates at the University of Texas at San Antonio, invented a device, initially called the aqua bonnet, during an engineering senior design class. One of the engineer’s wives worked as a nurse in a Neonatal Intensive Care Unit and explained the problem about babies developing cranial deformities because of all the pressure on their heads.

So the students developed a soft helmet-like medical device to relieve pressure and help prevent flat-head syndrome in newborn babies. They won the UTSA CITE entrepreneurship and technology competition in 2010.

The students decided to assign their invention to UTSA, which filed the initial patent application. In 2011, the students formed a company and the university licensed the technology to the company and provided further funding for the patent process. For providing those services, the university took an undisclosed equity stake in the venture, said Jackie Michel, director of technology transfer and commercialization at UTSA.

“This turned out to be one invention that makes my heart happy because it fulfills the mission of the university which is to disseminate knowledge for the benefit of society,” Michel said. “It’s a remarkable story.”

In May, Invictus Medical received Food and Drug Administration clearance to begin marketing its medical device, now known as the

GELShield, which provides extracranial pressure relief for babies.

Invictus is now selling the GELShield to hospitals nationwide. The device, which comes in small, medium and large sizes, focuses on relieving pressure on baby’s heads. That pressure can cause plagiocephaly, a cranial deformity exhibited in infants resulting from repeated external pressure to one area of the head. The condition can result in a baby having a misshaped or flat head. In addition to cosmetic issues, studies have linked the condition to development delays in infants and toddlers.

Already, more than 100 hospitals have expressed interest in the GELShield, said Tom Roberts, Invictus Medical’s President and CEO. The market is large for the device, he said. Nationwide, hospitals run about 1,200 Neonatal Intensive Care Units. Invictus is also working on an application to expand international sales to Canada and eventually Europe.

“In the United States every year there are four million babies born and about 20 percent to 30 percent of all babies develop some kind of cranial deformity,” Roberts said. “It can appear along a spectrum from a flat spot to a more pronounced cranial deformation.”

The problem affects one million infants annually, Roberts said. It’s the problem Invictus Medical’s GELShield helps to solve.

The Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas just completed a validation study using the device in its neonatal intensive care unit with 42 babies. The test began in February of 2014 and finished in the fall of 2014.

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Tom Roberts, Invictus Medical’s President and CEO, courtesy photo

Before the Invictus GELShield, the market did not provide a device like this to help babies with this problem, she said.

“Our product relieves the amount of pressure being applied on the baby’s head by up to 85 percent,” Roberts said.

The GELShield still allows the baby to continue to move his or her head, Roberts said.

To date, Invictus Medical has raised $5 million and is in the process of securing an additional $4.5 million in Series B funding.

That money will go to help market and sell the GELShield.

Roberts joined the company early on in 2011. He spent 30 years working for companies in the medical device industry including for Roche Diagnostics and Kinetic Concepts. He wanted to run a startup. Randy Goldsmith, head of the Texas Technology Development Center, known as T3DC, introduced him to Invictus Medical, which is in the T3DC incubator program.

“I was looking for something I could be very passionate about,” Roberts said. “I had an immediate connection with Invictus.”

Invictus, which means unconquerable in Latin, is a tribute to the young engineering students who started the whole thing, Roberts said. The students are no longer involved in the day-to-day operations of the company but remain shareholders in the venture.

“We evaluated the product for safety, fit and function,” said Chrysty Sturdivant, advanced clinical specialist and lead of the study at Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas.

“We wanted to make sure it didn’t cause any other problems like skin irritation or temperature changes or something unknown,” she said. And they found it did not cause any problems, she said.

Right now, nurses in Neonatal Intensive Care Units manually rotate the babies in their care every three to four hours. In the past, they’ve used pillows and other aids to prop the baby’s head. With the GELShield, the device provides the cushioning and relieves pressure to the baby’s head to help prevent deformities.

The Invictus GELShield eases the care for the baby because the nurses don’t have to fiddle with pillows any longer to make sure they are positioned correctly under the baby’s head, Sturdivant said.

“Now it’s easy to tell,” she said. “The medical device is either on or off the baby’s head.”

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Invictus now has 12 employees and it has outgrown its current space at 12500 Network Drive and is planning to move to larger headquarters soon, Roberts said. The company plans to add a few employees this year but expects its workforce to expand to 25 employees by 2018. It contracts with four separate manufacturing plants to make its GELShield devices.

Invictus has five distribution partnerships with 55 sales people nationwide, Roberts said.

But Invictus is not stopping with the GELShield product.

“We’re building a world class medical company,” Roberts said.

“We’re not a one product company.”

Invictus recently secured the worldwide commercialization rights from Northern Illinois University in Dekalb, Illinois for a second innovative technology focused on active noise reduction in the neonatal intensive care units. The company received a Phase I grant from the National Science Foundation for $240,000 to research and development the technology. It is also eligible to apply for a Phase II grant worth $750,000. George Hutchinson, Invictus’ Chief Technology Officer, is heading up the research, Roberts said.

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Bio Briefs on the Life Sciences Industry in Austin

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The Dell Medical School at the University of Texas at Austin is accepting applications for its first class of students. The school recently received preliminary accreditation. The first class will begin studies in 2016.

Seton Healthcare is building a $295 million teaching hospital, known as the Dell Seton Medical Center at The University of Texas to replace University Medical Center Brackenridge. It is expected to open in 2017.

The Austin Technology Council will host its annual fall conference on “Emerging Austin: Blurring the Lines Between Healthcare and Technology.” The conference will take place on Sept. 24th at the AT&T Conference Center. The topics include digital health, healthcare technology, patient/consumer data capture and more.

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And on Oct. 21, the Austin Technology Council will host its second annual ATC Life Sciences Summit at the Omni Hotel in downtown Austin. The daylong event will feature talks from

life sciences and health tech leaders. This year’s event will focus on increasing the growth of the life sciences technology sector in Austin.

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The Athena Health “More Disruption Please” accelerator in Austin is currently accepting applications from area healthcare technology startups. The accelerator provides office space, seed stage capital, access to experts and other tailored programming.

The Texas Emerging Technology Fund has awarded Austin Community College $4.9 million to develop a highly specialized biotechnology research lab known as a wet lab to address a critical shortage of research space in the region.

The Austin Chapter of Women in Bio recently launched to provide a network and support for women in the life sciences industry.

Sources: The University of Texas at Austin Dell Medical School, the Austin Technology Council, Athena Health, Texas Emerging Technology Fund, Women in Bio. Silicon Hills News 27

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Bio Briefs on the Life Sciences Industry in San Antonio

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The Barshop Institute for Longevity and Aging Studies, opened in 2005 and operated by the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, recently received two major grants. It received the Claude D. Pepper Older American Independence Center grant from the National Institute of Aging worth about $3.5 million during the next five years, according to the Health Science Center. It also received another National Institute of Aging grant worth about $3.5 million during the next five years, according to the Health Science Center.

at the center will focus on the role of genetic predisposition to metabolic changes, nutritional preferences, appetite regulations, food intake and choice and incidence of obesity-related illnesses.

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The Texas Technology Development Center, known as T3DC, will hold its next San Antonio Emerging Venture Pipeline Luncheon on Thursday, Oct. 8th at the Omni Hotel at the Colonnade. The quarterly luncheon series highlights up and coming bioscience and technology companies in San Antonio.

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The Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas awarded a total of $5 million in grants in May to the Cancer Therapy and Research Center at the University of Texas Health Science Center. The grants are focused on treatments to prevent liver, breast and colon cancers.

iRemedy Healthcare was named the first U.S. distributor of the AirStrip Sense4Baby System, a non-invasive, wireless electronic maternal and fetal monitoring system. iRemedy formed a strategic partnership with San Antonio-based AirStrip.

More than 10 years ago, AirStrip pioneered mobile monitoring in obstetrics with the industry’s first application to make live waveforms accessible on an iOS mobile device. Today, one in six babies born in the U.S. is monitored with AirStrip, according to the company.

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The Texas Biomedical Research Institute has joined forces with the nonprofit organization, Take Off Pounds Sensibly, known as TOPS, to establish the new TOPS Nutrition and Obesity Research Center. The goal of the center is to conduct research into the causes, health risks and treatment of human obesity. Studies

28 Silicon Hills News

BioMed SA plans to award its 10th annual Julio Palmaz Award for Innovation in Healthcare and Biosciences to W.E. Moerner, PhD of Stanford University and a Nobel Prize Winner in Chemistry. Moerner, a native of San Antonio, will receive the award at the Palmaz Award dinner on Sept. 10th at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in San Antonio.

Mission Pharmacal, based in San Antonio, has expanded its specialty manufacturing capabilities with the acquisition of the assets of ProSolus Pharmaceuticals of Miami. Mission is now making skin patch drug delivery products to treat a variety of health conditions. The company’s manufacturing plant in Boerne already produces tablets, gels, liquids, creams and semi-solids. The company makes Citracal for Bayer Consumer Care.

Sources: UT Health Science Center at San Antonio, The Texas Technology Development Center, Barshop Institute, CPRIT, Cancer Therapy and Research Center, Texas Biomedical Research Institute, Mission Pharmacal and BioMed SA.

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Share an InSpIratIonal evenIng WIth a nobel laureate.

N Join us as we present the 10th Annual Julio Palmaz Award for Innovation in Healthcare and the Biosciences.

BioMed SA is pleased to honor W.E. (William Esco) Moerner, Ph.D. with the 2015 Julio Palmaz Award for Innovation in Healthcare and the Biosciences. Dr. Moerner, who was raised in San Antonio and received the 2014 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, is being recognized for his groundbreaking work in super-resolution microscopy. Please join us as we celebrate his visionary work during a very memorable evening.

10th Annual Julio Palmaz Award Dinner Thursday, September 10, 2015 • Grand Hyatt San Antonio For tickets and sponsorship opportunities, please contact Donna Miller at 210.229.2118 or dmiller@biomedsa.org