InnovationRx: Jewel In The Metaverse

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Think back to 1995. Scrunchies. Beanie Babies. And Jewel’s first album “Pieces of You.” The singer and songwriter, who also started a nonprofit to help at-risk youth, is now a digital health startup cofounder. Innerworld offers peer mental health support in the metaverse. “We’ve seen a lot of people leverage gaming technology to be more addictive,” Jewel told the 12th annual Forbes Healthcare Summit. “We wanted to see what we could do to leverage this type of technology to be healing.”Picture avatars talking about their feelings and receiving coaching from trained guides. The company is calling it “cognitive behavioral immersion” and has received $2 million from the National Institute of Mental Health to conduct a randomized control trial of its tech at the University of Southern California.

Epic founder and CEO Judy Faulkner talked about a new function coming to the company’s electronic health records next year. “Best Care For My Patient” will allow doctors to search the 225 million de-identified patient records in Epic’s Cosmos to get recommendations on treatments that worked for other similar patient profiles. “That information is going to be shown to the clinician who can then make the best choices for the patient,” Faulkner said at the summit. That option will probably be available “next fall,” she said. In the meantime, a product around helping doctors identify mystery and rare diseases they may not have seen before called “LookAlikes” is live.

Qualtrics, a customer experience AI software company, announced a new integration with Epic that will enable health systems to better understand patient sentiment around their care. For example, say a patient is having trouble scheduling an appointment, Qualtrics’ software would escalate the interaction to a human who could help resolve the problem. The collaboration “will fuse the emotional experience of care – and responsiveness to it – into healthcare delivery,” Qualtrics’ chief medical officer Adrienne Boissy said in a statement.

Also at the summit, CVS Health CEO Karen Lynch announced the company was rebranding its health services segment under a new name, “CVS Healthspire” as it expands deeper into the provision of medical care. Two recent CVS acquisitions – senior primary care clinics Oak Street Health and home-care company Signify Health – will fall under this umbrella, along with the company’s Minute Clinics and Caremark pharmacy benefit manager, among others.

This Startup Just Raised $19 Million To Bring An Industrial Revolution To Biology

Biologists are able to manipulate genes, program cells and develop vaccines for new diseases in months. But major elements of basic research, like growing different types of cell cultures, have been handled without much change for decades. Growing cells on which they can research causes of and treatments for disease is still laboriously carried out by hand.

That’s where Mytos comes in. The London-based startup has developed an automated way to grow cells that enables scientists to focus on advancing their research instead of tediously manipulating cultures. Its self-contained cell incubation unit relies on a simple, fluidic system for automating the processes of adding nutrients to containers, monitoring growth in the number of cells, and other basic functions.

Read more here.

Pipeline & Deal Updates

FDA Approvals: The FDA expanded its approval of Octapharma’s wilate to include routine prophylactic use in IVs for patients with von Willebrand disease. It also approved Novartis’ Fabhalta as an oral therapy for patients with paroxysmal nocturnal hemoglobinuria and cleared BrainSpec’s software platform, which uses magnetic resonance spectroscopy and AI-powered analysis to non-invasively diagnose brain-related illnesses.

Gene Editing: Eligo Bioscience, which is developing gene therapies for diseases caused by bacteria in the microbiome, announced it has raised a $30 million series B round led by Sanofi Ventures.

Drug Discovery: Aqemia, which uses a physics-inspired AI platform for small molecule drug discovery, announced it has entered into a multi-year collaboration with Sanofi. The deal is potentially worth up to $140 million, contingent on hitting certain milestones.

Antibody Discovery: AbSci, which has developed a generative AI antibody discovery platform, has entered into a partnership with AstraZeneca to advance a potential cancer treatment. The deal is potentially worth up to $247 million, not counting potential royalties on drug sales.

Embryo Gene Sequencing: Genomics startup Orchid announced that it is now offering whole genome sequencing of embryos in IVF clinics across the country.

Elevance Health’s PBM Launches 24/7 Digital Pharmacy

Elevance Health’s pharmacy benefit manager is launching a new digital “pharmacy” that allows health plan enrollees to engage more with pharmacists and track their prescriptions like Americans track a pizza delivery. The move comes as retailers, including Amazon, CVS Health and Walgreens and rival health insurers and PBMs owned by The Cigna Group and UnitedHealth Group are increasing spending on real-time digital capabilities and speedier prescription delivery to patients.

Read more here.

Other Healthcare News

Roche is acquiring drugmaker Carmot Therapeutics, which develops anti-obesity and diabetes drugs, for $2.7 billion.

Less than a month after receiving FDA approval, Eli Lilly’s weight loss drug Zepbound is now available in U.S. pharmacies.

Millennial and Gen Z women face an increased risk of homicide and suicide compared to previous generations, according to a new report.

A Texas woman is challenging the state’s strict abortion laws and asking a judge for permission to terminate her pregnancy due to a severe fetal anomaly.

Across Forbes

Inside AriZona Iced Tea’s Bold Plan To Challenge Twisted Tea

Why The Residential Solar Industry Is In Danger Of Imploding

Is It Time To Convert Your IRA To A Roth?

What Else We are Reading

New gene therapies confront many sickle cell patients with an impossible choice: a cure or fertility (Stat)

Is AI leading to a reproducibility crisis in science? (Nature)

Patients Expected Profemur Artificial Hips to Last. Then They Snapped in Half. (KFF Health News)