Year: 2019

If the researchers, executives and investors behind Coda Biotherapeutics have their way, one day soon there really could be a cure for pain.

Co-founded by researchers Joseph Glorioso, from the University of Pittsburgh’s microbiology and molecular genetics department; and Dr. Nicholas Boulis, the founder of Emory’s Gene and Cell Therapy for Neurorestoration Laboratory; Coda uses gene therapies to treat neurological diseases starting with severe pain and epilepsy.

America is a country in pain. There are over 19 million Americans who live with chronic neuropathic pain, according to Coda’s own statistics. And over the past twenty years the doctors treating those Americans and the drug companies developing therapies for them have managed to turn their treatment into a new epidemic — opioid addiction.

In 2017, 47,600 Americans died from opioid-involved overdoses, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Of those deaths, about 60% involved synthetic opioids.

“The incentives were there for people to prescribe more and more, particularly when they had already been convinced it was the right thing to do — the compassionate thing to do,” Keith Humphreys, a psychiatrist at Stanford University and a former White House drug-policy adviser, told the journal Nature.

As the pain epidemic and attendant opioid crisis began to skyrocket several companies have been racing to find alternatives to the drug treatments that were now killing Americans by the thousands. Other approaches like electrical nerve stimulation can carry risks, and invasive surgeries are an unappealing last resort, according to Coda’s chief executive.

Coda’s experimental treatment is based on a science called chemogenetics, which uses a harmless virus to create new receptors in the sensory neurons that provide signals to the brain about physical stimuli. Those receptors can be unlocked by small molecule drugs, which would instruct the sensory neurons to stop firing, thereby cutting off the signals of pain to the brain.

Coda’s virus on a neural cell (Image courtesy of Coda Biotherapeutics)

The idea behind chemogenetics is to engineer a receptor that when you put it in with a… gene therapy… it does nothing. We’ve engineered it so that it is no longer responsive,” says Michael Narachi, the president and chief executive officer at Coda. “Most of these receptors are naturally opened or closed by acetylcholine… We’ve engineered these receptors so that  they’re no longer responsive to acetylcholine, but they are responsive to a man-made drug.”

The company then draws from a portfolio of receptor small-molecule drug pairs that were developed and tested for their pharmacological and toxicological effects, but discarded because of a lack of efficacy, to create new therapies with receptors tailored to respond to those drugs.

“What we’ve done is flipped the whole paradigm on its head. We’re making the lock that can work with these keys,” says Narachi. 

So far, the company has raised $34 million as investors including Versant Ventures, MPM Capital and Astellas Venture Management have doubled down on their initial $19 million commitment to the new drug developer. 

“Since coming out of stealth mode last September, the CODA team has made tremendous progress in developing its gene therapy program that is tunable, durable and highly selective, which allows for better efficacy and safety with fewer off-target effects,” said Tom Woiwode, Ph.D., managing director at Versant Ventures and CODA Chairman, in a statement. “CODA’s platform holds great promise to significantly transform how we treat challenging conditions and disorders for which new therapeutic options are greatly needed.” 

Pain isn’t the only condition that Coda hopes to treat. The company is also working on therapies that can reduce the severity of epilepsy for the nearly 3.4 million people in the U.S. who have the condition. While the company can’t treat all kinds of epilepsy, Coda says that it could address focal epilepsy, which represents 60% of all manifestations of the condition, and is linked to a specific region of the brain.

By engineering neurotransmitter receptors that are activated by medicines that can be taken orally, Coda thinks it can control the activity of neurons responsible for both chronic pain and focal epilepsy.

The next step for the company — and part of the use of proceeds from its new $15 million cash infusion — will . be to proceed with early animal trials. These clinical trials will be followed by human trials.

“This is a research platform,” says Narachi. “We have this portfolio of engineered receptors and we’re testing them in cells. The next step is to go into human clinical trials.”

If the researchers, executives and investors behind Coda Biotherapeutics have their way, one day soon there really could be a cure for pain.

Co-founded by researchers Joseph Glorioso, from the University of Pittsburgh’s microbiology and molecular genetics department; and Dr. Nicholas Boulis, the founder of Emory’s Gene and Cell Therapy for Neurorestoration Laboratory; Coda uses gene therapies to treat neurological diseases starting with severe pain and epilepsy.

America is a country in pain. There are over 19 million Americans who live with chronic neuropathic pain, according to Coda’s own statistics. And over the past twenty years the doctors treating those Americans and the drug companies developing therapies for them have managed to turn their treatment into a new epidemic — opioid addiction.

In 2017, 47,600 Americans died from opioid-involved overdoses, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Of those deaths, about 60% involved synthetic opioids.

“The incentives were there for people to prescribe more and more, particularly when they had already been convinced it was the right thing to do — the compassionate thing to do,” Keith Humphreys, a psychiatrist at Stanford University and a former White House drug-policy adviser, told the journal Nature.

As the pain epidemic and attendant opioid crisis began to skyrocket several companies have been racing to find alternatives to the drug treatments that were now killing Americans by the thousands. Other approaches like electrical nerve stimulation can carry risks, and invasive surgeries are an unappealing last resort, according to Coda’s chief executive.

Coda’s experimental treatment is based on a science called chemogenetics, which uses a harmless virus to create new receptors in the sensory neurons that provide signals to the brain about physical stimuli. Those receptors can be unlocked by small molecule drugs, which would instruct the sensory neurons to stop firing, thereby cutting off the signals of pain to the brain.

Coda’s virus on a neural cell (Image courtesy of Coda Biotherapeutics)

The idea behind chemogenetics is to engineer a receptor that when you put it in with a… gene therapy… it does nothing. We’ve engineered it so that it is no longer responsive,” says Michael Narachi, the president and chief executive officer at Coda. “Most of these receptors are naturally opened or closed by acetylcholine… We’ve engineered these receptors so that  they’re no longer responsive to acetylcholine, but they are responsive to a man-made drug.”

The company then draws from a portfolio of receptor small-molecule drug pairs that were developed and tested for their pharmacological and toxicological effects, but discarded because of a lack of efficacy, to create new therapies with receptors tailored to respond to those drugs.

“What we’ve done is flipped the whole paradigm on its head. We’re making the lock that can work with these keys,” says Narachi. 

So far, the company has raised $34 million as investors including Versant Ventures, MPM Capital and Astellas Venture Management have doubled down on their initial $19 million commitment to the new drug developer. 

“Since coming out of stealth mode last September, the CODA team has made tremendous progress in developing its gene therapy program that is tunable, durable and highly selective, which allows for better efficacy and safety with fewer off-target effects,” said Tom Woiwode, Ph.D., managing director at Versant Ventures and CODA Chairman, in a statement. “CODA’s platform holds great promise to significantly transform how we treat challenging conditions and disorders for which new therapeutic options are greatly needed.” 

Pain isn’t the only condition that Coda hopes to treat. The company is also working on therapies that can reduce the severity of epilepsy for the nearly 3.4 million people in the U.S. who have the condition. While the company can’t treat all kinds of epilepsy, Coda says that it could address focal epilepsy, which represents 60% of all manifestations of the condition, and is linked to a specific region of the brain.

By engineering neurotransmitter receptors that are activated by medicines that can be taken orally, Coda thinks it can control the activity of neurons responsible for both chronic pain and focal epilepsy.

The next step for the company — and part of the use of proceeds from its new $15 million cash infusion — will . be to proceed with early animal trials. These clinical trials will be followed by human trials.

“This is a research platform,” says Narachi. “We have this portfolio of engineered receptors and we’re testing them in cells. The next step is to go into human clinical trials.”

Google has partnered with several tech companies to develop and build OpenTitan, a new, collaborative open-source secure chip design project.

The aim of the new coalition is to build trustworthy chip designs for use in datacenters, storage, and computer peripherals, which are both open and transparent, allowing anyone to inspect the hardware for security vulnerabilities and backdoors.

It comes at a time where tech giants and governments alike are increasingly aware that hostile nation states are trying to infiltrate and compromise supply chains in an effort to carry out long-term surveillance or espionage.

OpenTitan builds off the success of Google’s own custom-built chip, Titan, which it uses in its multi-factor security keys and its own-brand Android phones. Critical to the chip’s success is its root-of-trust technology, which cryptographically ensures that the chip hasn’t been tampered with. Root-of-trust provides a solid foundation for the operating system and applications running on the chip.

Google said OpenTitan will be run by LowRisc, a non-profit community, and will rely on partnerships with ETH Zurich, G+D Mobile Security, Nuvoton Technology, and Western Digital to support the project.

OpenTitan will also be platform agnostic and can be adapted to almost any device or software, Google said.

It’s not the first project dedicated to building secure chip designs. The Open Compute Project, supported by Facebook, Intel and Google, was created to open-source designs for its core infrastructure servers as part of an effort to gain better efficiencies from datacenter operations.

Apple also has its own secure — albeit proprietary — custom silicon, the Apple T2, found in its latest MacBooks, which it uses to control a device’s security functions and store the user’s passwords and encryption keys.

Google has partnered with several tech companies to develop and build OpenTitan, a new, collaborative open-source secure chip design project.

The aim of the new coalition is to build trustworthy chip designs for use in datacenters, storage, and computer peripherals, which are both open and transparent, allowing anyone to inspect the hardware for security vulnerabilities and backdoors.

It comes at a time where tech giants and governments alike are increasingly aware that hostile nation states are trying to infiltrate and compromise supply chains in an effort to carry out long-term surveillance or espionage.

OpenTitan builds off the success of Google’s own custom-built chip, Titan, which it uses in its multi-factor security keys and its own-brand Android phones. Critical to the chip’s success is its root-of-trust technology, which cryptographically ensures that the chip hasn’t been tampered with. Root-of-trust provides a solid foundation for the operating system and applications running on the chip.

Google said OpenTitan will be run by LowRisc, a non-profit community, and will rely on partnerships with ETH Zurich, G+D Mobile Security, Nuvoton Technology, and Western Digital to support the project.

OpenTitan will also be platform agnostic and can be adapted to almost any device or software, Google said.

It’s not the first project dedicated to building secure chip designs. The Open Compute Project, supported by Facebook, Intel and Google, was created to open-source designs for its core infrastructure servers as part of an effort to gain better efficiencies from datacenter operations.

Apple also has its own secure — albeit proprietary — custom silicon, the Apple T2, found in its latest MacBooks, which it uses to control a device’s security functions and store the user’s passwords and encryption keys.

Google has partnered with several tech companies to develop and build OpenTitan, a new, collaborative open-source secure chip design project.

The aim of the new coalition is to build trustworthy chip designs for use in datacenters, storage, and computer peripherals, which are both open and transparent, allowing anyone to inspect the hardware for security vulnerabilities and backdoors.

It comes at a time where tech giants and governments alike are increasingly aware that hostile nation states are trying to infiltrate and compromise supply chains in an effort to carry out long-term surveillance or espionage.

OpenTitan builds off the success of Google’s own custom-built chip, Titan, which it uses in its multi-factor security keys and its own-brand Android phones. Critical to the chip’s success is its root-of-trust technology, which cryptographically ensures that the chip hasn’t been tampered with. Root-of-trust provides a solid foundation for the operating system and applications running on the chip.

Google said OpenTitan will be run by LowRisc, a non-profit community, and will rely on partnerships with ETH Zurich, G+D Mobile Security, Nuvoton Technology, and Western Digital to support the project.

OpenTitan will also be platform agnostic and can be adapted to almost any device or software, Google said.

It’s not the first project dedicated to building secure chip designs. The Open Compute Project, supported by Facebook, Intel and Google, was created to open-source designs for its core infrastructure servers as part of an effort to gain better efficiencies from datacenter operations.

Apple also has its own secure — albeit proprietary — custom silicon, the Apple T2, found in its latest MacBooks, which it uses to control a device’s security functions and store the user’s passwords and encryption keys.

I guess these days it’s not enough to have meetings. Now tech companies need to have meetings about meetings — and to ensure that this can happen efficiently(?), a Los Angeles company called Parabol has just raised $4 million.

Founded in Brooklyn with a workforce that’s mostly virtual, the new-ish company managed to raise cash from three firms which know a thing or two about enterprise operations — CRV, Haystack, and the SlackFund.

Parabol’s software allow distributed and in-house teams to talk about how effective different processes and meetings have been.

The company says that over 500 organizations use the company’s suite of software services.

“Parabol was created so that every meeting held amongst team members is actually worth the time invested. With the support of CRV and Haystack, we will make Parabol useful to more kinds of teams, and scale Parabol’s infrastructure to match our rate of growth,” said the company’s chief executive and founder, Jordan Husney, in a statement.

The tools Parabol developed allow workers to conduct retrospective meetings and check-ins, the company said. I can think of nothing more useless than a post-mortem on a process that is morbidly inefficient to begin with, but I hate people so this app is clearly not for me.

The software allows teams to work through five, structured meeting phases where teams evaluate their processes and make improvements at the end of a project, said the company.

“Parabol is transforming the way agile teams across industries work together,” said Izhar Armony, Partner at CRV, in a statement. “We’ve been tracking the rapidly rising need for teams to collaborate at a distance, and believe in the way Parabol is enabling people to meet and work more effectively together.”

A UK drone registration scheme has opened ahead of the deadline for owners to register their devices coming into force at the end of this month.

The UK government announced its intention to introduce a drone registration scheme two years ago.

The rules apply to drones or model aircraft weighting between 250g and 20kg.

Owners of drones wanting to fly the device themselves must also take and pass a theory test to gain a flyer ID by November 30. Anyone who wishes to fly a drone owned by someone else must also first obtain a flyer ID by passing the theory test.

UK ministers have come in for serious criticism for lagging on drone regulations in recent years after a spate of drone sightings at the country’s busiest airport grounded flights last December, disrupting thousands of travellers. In January flights were also briefly halted at Heathrow airport after another unidentified drone sighting.

This fall the police investigation into the Gatwick drone shutdown found that at least two drones had been involved. In September police also said they had been unable to identify any suspects — ruling out 96 people of interest.

Following the Gatwick disruption the government tightened existing laws around drone flights near airports — extending a no-fly zone from 1km to 5km. But a full drone bill, originally slated for introduction this year, has yet to take off.

As well as introducing a legal requirement for drone owners to register their craft via the Civil Aviation Authority’s website by November 30, the new stop-gap rules require organizations that use drones to register for an operator ID too, also at a cost of £9 per year.

All drones must also be labeled with the operator ID. This must be clearly visible on the main body of the craft, and easy to read when it’s on the ground, written in block capital letters taller than 3mm high.

The registered person who obtains the operator ID must be aged 18 or older and is accountable for managing drones to ensure only individuals with a flyer ID fly them.

Individuals must be aged 13 or older to obtain a flyer ID.

The online test for obtaining the flyer ID involves answering 20 multiple choice questions. The pass mark for the test is set at 16. There’s no limit on how many times the test can be taken.

The Civil Aviation Authority says everything needed to pass the test can be found in The Drone and Model Aircraft Code. There’s no charge for taking the test or obtaining the flyer ID.

Xiaomi, which competes with Apple for the top position in the wearable market, today made the competition a little more interesting. The Chinese electronics giant has launched its first smartwatch called the Mi Watch that looks strikingly similar to the Apple Watch in its home market.

The Mi Watch, like the Apple Watch, has a square body with a crown and a button. It sports a 1.78-inch AMOLED display (326 ppi) that offers the always-on capability and runs MIUI for Watch, the company’s homegrown wearable operating system based on Google’s Wear OS.

Inside the metal housing — aluminum alloy with a matte finish — are microphones on two sides for recording audio and taking calls, and a loudspeaker on the left to listen to music or incoming calls. The Mi Watch, which comes in one size — 44mm — has a ceramic back, which is where the charging pins and a heart rate sensor are also placed.

The Mi Watch is powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Wear 3100 4G chipset with four Cortex A7 cores clocked at 1.2GHz, coupled with 1GB of RAM and 8GB storage. The company says its first smartwatch supports cellular connectivity (through an eSIM), Wi-Fi, GPS, Bluetooth, and NFC for payments. The Mi Watch should last for 36 hours on a single charge on cellular mode, the company claimed.

The Mi Watch will also help users track their sleep, performance while swimming, cycling and running, and also measure their heart rate.

Over 40 popular Chinese apps such as TikTok and QQ Messenger are available for the Mi Watch on day one. The company’s own XiaoAI assistant is the default virtual digital assistant on the watch.

The Mi Watch is priced at CNY 1,299 ($185) and will go on sale in the country next week. There’s no word on international availability just yet, but if the past is any indication, Xiaomi will likely bring the device to India, Singapore, Indonesia and other markets in coming quarters.

The company says a variant of the Mi Watch that sports a sapphire glass and stainless steel will go on sale next month in China. It is priced at CNY 1,999 ($285).

The countdown to serious savings continues here at TechCrunch, and this is a timely reminder that you that you have only four days left to save on early bird passes to Disrupt Berlin 2019 (11-12 December). Kommst du nun, oder was — you are coming, aren’t you?

Pricing starts at €445 + VAT and, depending on which pass you buy, you can save as much as €500. Das ist gut! If you want to reap the savings, you need to buy your early bird pass before the deadline: 8 November at 11:59 p.m. (CEST). 

Let’s talk about some of the reasons so many people attend Disrupt Berlin. It’s an opportunity to connect with and learn from an international community of early-stage startuppers — founders, investors, engineers, marketers and more. Be inspired by both your contemporaries and by the folks who’ve paved the way, achieved success and want to share their insights.

Don’t take our (admittedly biased) word for it. Here’s what some of your peers have to say about their time at Disrupt.

• “Disrupt Berlin was a massively positive experience. It gave us the chance to show our technology to the world and have meaningful conversations with investors, accelerators, incubators, solo founders and developers.” —  Vlad Larin, co-founder of Zeroqode.
• “I was very pleasantly surprised at the number of early-stage startups in attendance. Disrupt is a very good conference, and you’ll make a lot of connections very quickly that you wouldn’t be able to do otherwise.” — Michael Kocan, co-found and managing partner, Trend Discovery.
• “Disrupt helps you connect with the startup community. You can meet investors and bigger players in your industry to see if there’s an opportunity to work together. TechCrunch Disrupt is unique and incredibly valuable, because it brings everyone — all the industry touch points — together under one roof.” — Sage Wohns, co-founder, Agolo.

Get ready to hear from a stellar group of speakers on both the Main and Extra Crunch stages — or in our Q&A Sessions. Start planning now by perusing the Disrupt Berlin agenda, and don’t be surprised if we add a few more surprise speakers to it in the coming weeks.

You certainly won’t want to miss out on Startup Battlefield, our thrilling pitch competition with a $50,000 prize. And be sure to catch the Hackathon finalists on the Extra Crunch stage as they pitch products they designed, coded and created in roughly 24 hours. Who will win the $5,000 prize for best overall hack?

Disrupt Berlin 2019 takes place on 11-12 December, but you have only four days left to take advantage of early bird pricing. Beat the deadline — 8 November at 11:59 p.m. (CEST) deadline, buy your passes and save up to €500. Kommst du nun, oder was — you are coming, aren’t you?

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at Disrupt Berlin 2019? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

Medopad, the UK startup that has been working with Tencent to develop AI-based methods for building and tracking “digital” biomarkers — measurable indicators of the progression of illnesses and diseases that are picked up not with blood samples or in-doctor visits but using apps and wearables, has announced another round of funding to expand the scope of its developments. It has picked up $25 million led by pharmaceuticals giant Bayer, which will be working together with Medopad to build digital biomarkers and therapeutics related to heart health. Medopad said it is also working on separate biomarkers related to Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and Diabetes.

The Series B is being made at a post-money valuation of between $200 million and $300 million. In addition to Bayer, Hong Kong firm NWS Holdings and Chicago VC Healthbox also participated. All three are previous investors, with NWS leading its $28 million Series A in 2018, bringing the total raised by Medopad to over $50 million. It also comes on the heels of the company signing a high-profile deals totalling some $140 million with a string of firms in China, including Tencent, Ping An, and the Chinese divisions of GSK, Johnson & Johnson and more.

The world where medicine mixes with tech in the name of doing things faster, better and with less expense had a big knock with the rise and calamitous fall of Theranos, the blood-testing startup that claimed to have developed technology to perform a multitude of tests tracking biomarkers using only a few drops of blood — tests that used to require significantly more blood (and expense) to run accurately. Great concept, if only it weren’t a scam.

While Medopad also tracks biomarkers, it’s taking a very different, non-invasive route to building its solutions. The company constructs its algorithms and tracking working with pharmaceutical and tech partners to build the solution end-to-end, leaning on advances in software and hardware to fulfil ideas that have been unattainable goals for a long time.

“For the past 25 years, we have been talking about this connected healthcare, but no one has doe it,” CEO Dan Vahdat, who co-founded the company with Rich Khatib, said in an interview. “The nature of the concept has just been too challenging. The approach is established but the computing and device technology wasn’t able to detect and read these things outside of hospital settings.”

In one example, a classic Parkinson’s test would have required a patient to go to into a doctor’s office for a 30-minute assessment to determine how a patient is walking. In recent times, however, with the advent of advanced computer vision and far better sensors on devices, a new category of digital biomarkers, as Vahdat calls them, are being created — for example, by tracking how a person is walking — her/his gait and other metrics — to provide similar guidance to a clinician on the patient’s progress. “These can be collected, for example, based on how you walk and talk, along with other vital signs,” he said.

The startup is also working with teaching hospitals to build other clinical trials. For example it has a partnership with the Royal Wolverhampton to better track Aortic Stenosis, when heart valves narrow and restrict blood flow.

“This is a very exciting project and fits with our ethos of ‘proactive’ and ‘one to many care’ which, we think, will benefit patients and release valuable clinical time,” said Professor James Cotton at The Royal Wolverhampton NHS Trust, in a statement.

Longer term, it’s also working with Janssen (a division of Johnson & Johnson) a possible way of tracking early signs and progress of Alzheimers by way of cognitive tests that someone can take at home.

Medopad has a healthy approach to the work it is doing reminiscent of the kind of collaboration that is typical in the world of science, which perhaps is the aspect that sets it apart best from the vapourware of the world. “We won’t claim that we can do what others can’t, but we are using foundations that were built years ago, to discover and commercially deploy solutions via our channel.” He added that Babylon in the UK and Collective Health in the UK are two companies he admires for taking a similar approach in their respective fields of doctor/patient care and health insurance.

The fact that the company works so closely with Tencent and other Chinese companies is notable at a time when there is a lot of scrutiny of China and how its companies may be using or working with personal data in countries like the US and UK. Vahdat said that all patient data is only collected with consent, and if any data from Medopad is passed to its partners, it’s anonymised. A patient’s data, furthermore, does not leave the country in which it is collected.

The Tencent partnership, he added, was largely to help build the company’s AI engine, with China’s massive population providing a ripe background to train machine learning algorithms.

Medopad’s main asset, in any case, is not data, but the algorithms and methods it uses to collect and process digital biomarkers.

“We are a big believer in the fact that data is not our product,” he said. “That is something we are really proud of.”