Cultivian Sandbox Startups Leveraging Tech Against COVID-19

On behalf of the Cultivian Sandbox team, we hope that you and your families, friends and colleagues are doing well and keeping safe during these challenging times. Our hearts go out to those battling illness, and we extend our gratitude to those who continue to provide essential services at their own personal risk, including those on the front lines of healthcare, agriculture, and food distribution.

We also want to acknowledge the many innovators and startups who are leveraging their creativity and capabilities to develop new solutions to the COVID-19 crisis, across monitoring, diagnostics, therapeutics, and vaccines. Several of our portfolio companies are engaged in these efforts, so we’d like to highlight them in this piece.

As a firm, we are excited to be able to support these entrepreneurs in their important work, and are hopeful that their efforts, along with those of countless other technology companies, will help get us through this crisis.

We wish you and your families the best of health, and hope that we’ll see you — in-person or virtually — sometime soon.

— Cultivian Sandbox Ventures

AAD (Morrisville, NC)

Developed initially as a rapid diagnostic test for livestock, AAD’s foundational technology has been used to develop a 2-minute patient-side immune system check for humans. The test can be used to screen for COVID-19 and predict severity of illness for those in the early stage of infection, all with real-time centralized reporting. The company is pursuing authorization from the FDA for COVID-19 applications, and is looking for hospital and clinic collaborators to use the test in point-of-care settings. News coverage of this work can be found here and here.

If you have hospital connections that may be interested in collaborating with AAD, please contact Joy Drach at joy@aadiagnostics.com.

Culture Biosciences (South San Francisco, CA)

With its biomanufacturing-as-a-service platform for industrial biotech and biopharma customers, Culture Biosciences is assisting companies that are developing antiviral therapeutics and vaccines for COVID-19 by providing at-cost process development services to optimize manufacturing and scale-up.

If you know a company that is working on developing a vaccine or antiviral for COVID-19 that requires fermentation for production, please reach out to Max Gilbert at max@culturebiosciences.com.

Descartes Labs (Santa Fe, NM)

Descartes Labs has developed a suite of remote sensing and predictive modeling capabilities that have been used by customers to better understand our world, with applications across agriculture, insurance, mining, and many other industries. Now, Descartes is using these same technologies to track, in real-time and at scale, the global impacts of COVID-19. State and local governments, researchers, and news organizations are generating insights from Descartes’ aggregated mobility tracking, location-specific activity tracking, regional NO2 tracking, and supply chain tracking, which has allowed organizations to understand the impact of social distancing (here) and monitor changes in traffic and pollution (here and here), among other use cases.

For more details about Descartes Labs’ findings, read their blog post here. If you know of potential users of Descartes’ platform, please contact Phil Fraher at phil@descarteslabs.com.

Nuritas (Dublin, Ireland)

Nuritas has developed machine learning technology that is capable of rapidly identifying peptides that modulate molecular targets or pathways. Knowing that high-risk COVID-19 patients suffer from acute pulmonary inflammation, Nuritas has been able to identify a combination of peptides that target and dampen the expression of the major cytokines that cause this acute inflammation. The company proposes that the peptides would be delivered via inhaler and would reduce inflammation without suppressing patients’ immune systems. This inhaler could benefit SARS-CoV, MERS-CoV, COVID-19 and future coronavirus outbreaks. To accelerate this approach, Nuritas was awarded a grant from Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE) with 40M core supercomputer hours to identify novel treatments for patients with COVID-19.

Nuritas is seeking collaborators to advance these efforts and deliver this approach. If you have interest in partnering with Nuritas, please contact Nora Khaldi at nora@nuritas.com.