In this week’s edition of InnovationRx, we look at a new biotech fund spearheaded by Recursion, a shift in bird flu strategy from the Trump Administration, a new vaccine approval from the FDA, Nvidia’s latest AI model for life sciences and more. To get it in your inbox, subscribe here.
The Trump Administration policies of spending freezes and grant cuts have thrown the biotech industry into disarray. Although federal judges have placed a hold on any spending freezes, uncertainty plus persistent inflation makes it a hard environment for early-stage biotech startups to get the funds they need to keep going.
In response to these policy shifts, Recursion announced today that its biotech accelerator Altitude Lab is launching a pre-seed venture fund to support biotech startups. The fund will provide up to $250,000 in capital, 12 months of lab space and access to Altitude Lab’s accelerator program for biotech startups that have been reviewed for Small Business Innovation Research grants.
“If policymakers fail to act swiftly to restore this funding, then it’s up to us to bridge the gap,” Recursion CEO wrote in an article published in Stat explaining his motivation for starting the fund. “I’m eager to share what we’ve learned in launching Altitude Lab Fund and to collaborate with others who are committed to sustaining biotech innovation during this uncertain time.”
Trump Administration Wants To Control Avian Flu With Vaccines
Avian flu continues to spread among both dairy and chicken farms, which is driving up egg prices and also infecting more people. A report from the CDC, for example, shows that many dairy veterinarians may be infected with the virus without showing symptoms. To that end, the Trump Administration said that it wants to shift the strategy on controlling the outbreak, moving away from mass culling of flocks and toward stronger containment and vaccinations.
Last week, the Department of Agriculture granted a conditional license to Zoetis for a flu vaccine that can be administered to poultry, a key step on the path to approval to be placed on the market and used at farms. A USDA spokesperson also told Forbes that the agency has approved several field studies of avian flu vaccines for dairy cattle.
A vaccine for poultry could help ensure that avian flu has more limited exposure to humans. That’s because many people infected with the disease from birds are farm workers who “took part in poultry culling operations,” Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, told Forbes in an email. “Vaccination of poultry may lessen the need for those types of activities so could reduce spillover risk to poultry workers.”
BIOTECH AND PHARMA
The FDA has approved GSK’s new vaccine against invasive meningococcal disease for people aged 10 to 25 years. Unlike previous vaccines, this one targets all five major types of bacteria that cause the disease. It does so by combining elements of two of GSK’s other IMD vaccines, which have been on the market for years. In a clinical trial of over 4,800 people, the vaccine showed a strong safety profile and immune response.
DIGITAL HEALTH AND AI
Nvidia continues to make more moves into the life sciences. Today, the company unveiled Evo 2, an AI foundation model developed by the nonprofit Arc Institute in collaboration with researchers at UC San Francisco, Stanford and UC Berkeley. The model is trained on the DNA of over 100,000 different species and aims to enable researchers to better understand patterns in genes across species. The model can even design genomes for simple bacteria. The training itself took place on Nvidia’s DGX Cloud AI platform, and Greg Brockman, president and cofounder of OpenAI, spent part of his recent sabbatical from the company working on the technical aspects of its training. Nvidia has made Evo 2 available to scientists on its life sciences research platform BioNeMo.
MEDTECH
Since its 2006 founding, $3.5 billion (market cap) iRhythm Technologies has built its business around one core product: an easy-to-wear heart monitor that attaches to the body like a big adhesive bandage. After a patient wears it for 14 days, the San Francisco-based company can use AI to look for irregular heartbeats among the 1.5 million to 2 million it captures – and flag those arrhythmias (a leading cause of strokes) for the physicians who ordered the test.
Now, CEO Quentin Blackford tells Forbes that the company (which anticipates 2024 revenue slightly above $588 million) wants to get approval to use similar monitoring for additional diseases, starting with sleep apnea. His company also plans to look at the overlap of arrhythmias and other diseases, such as COPD, kidney disease and diabetes, to ideally prevent heart attacks and strokes. “We think the signals of the heart tell us so many things of different disease states,” Blackford said.
PUBLIC HEALTH AND HOSPITALS
The CDC’s advisory board has sent a letter to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and acting CDC director Susan Monarez criticizing widespread cuts being made to public health across agencies, Stat reported. “While the firing of these experts would be dangerous under any circumstances, this action seems especially reckless at a time when there is an Ebola virus outbreak in Uganda, surging seasonal influenza in the United States, a new strain of mpox emerging in the world, and a massive outbreak of avian influenza in our country with newly identified human cases resulting from transmission from cattle,” the board wrote.
DEAL OF THE WEEK
Lithuanian-based biotech startup Atrandi Biosciences raised a $25 million series A round led by Lux Capital. The company has developed a semi-permeable capsule for holding single cells in analysis, with a goal of avoiding the technological tradeoffs of conventional technologies. The company claimed this enables higher throughput for researchers in labs. With the new capital in hand, the company said it aims to further develop its technology and expand its commercial operations into the United States.
WHAT WE’RE READING
The Department of Health and Human Services has reversed its previous plans to shut down a program that ships free Covid-19 tests to Americans.
A young woman has been in remission from cancer for 19 years, the longest recorded remission after treatment with CAR-T therapy.
Despite his pledge to Senator Bill Cassidy that he wouldn’t interfere with childhood vaccination schedules, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. appears poised to commission a panel to review them.
A new study finds that generic drugs manufactured in India are linked to more adverse events compared to those made in the U.S.
States with abortion bans say they’ve seen very few–or even zero–abortions, but medical professionals cast doubt on those claims.
Johnson and Johnson has put its stroke care business up for sale, aiming for a valuation of more than $1 billion.
AI-generated voice clones are being used by patients with motor neuron diseases to enable them to communicate again.
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