Meet AlphaLab Health’s Third Cohort
The following companies were competitively selected to participate in our six-month program that will help them navigate key risk points in the clinical and commercial development of their companies. The companies also receive up to $100,000 in pre-seed investment. This cohort features a wide range of companies from diagnostics, medical devices, and healthcare pricing transparency.
AlphaLab Health is a unique partnership between Innovation Works and Allegheny Health Network, with the goal of accelerating the time to clinical use. Launched in 2020, it is a key part of the Pittsburgh life sciences and biotech ecosystem that has recently been recognized as one of the top emerging innovation clusters in the world. Several of the companies from the first cohort, which was completed in June, have already surpassed their goals for follow-on funding and met other milestones of growth. The program is run out of a former hospital in Bellevue that has been repurposed to support innovation and community health.
Advanced Optronics Inc— Taking the guesswork out of getting a cochlear implant. Advanced Optronics (AO) designs and manufactures implantable sensors for intraoperative monitoring. AO’s first product is an integrated force and position sensor for cochlear implants (CIs). These sensors provide real-time feedback to surgeons during surgery to reduce trauma and avoid damage to residual hearing during implantation. Their solution empowers surgeons with the ability to perform less traumatic insertions and preserve residual hearing.
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Why we’re excited about them: Transferring cutting-edge bench research to a profound clinical application always excites us. The novel microfabrication approach to design implantation guides for cochlear implant surgery will increase the adoption of cochlear implants.
Expressive Painimation — Through human-centered design, Expressive Painimation developed an electronic pain assessment tool that utilizes animations to assess pain quality and type. The speed and saturation of the animations can be calibrated by patients to assess intensity and course. Painimation does not rely on words so language and literacy are no longer barriers to care. Painimation, the animation-based pain measure, is not only easy-to-use, engaging, and patient-centered, but preliminary published data suggests that Painimation improves patients’ ability to communicate their pain and may be equally as effective for discriminating pain types as other validated pain scales.
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Why we’re excited about them: Clinical pain assessment is vague, non-informative, and suffers from many barriers to successful implementation. Expressive Painimation uses animation and data science to develop tools to accurately reflect patients’ pain allowing them to communicate more effectively with their care provider.
Handl Health — Handl Health is a healthcare price transparency platform. Handl offers health plans a simple way to comply with the CMS healthcare price transparency legislation while digitizing how patients shop, book, and pay for healthcare, creating an unparalleled user experience and realizing an average cost saving of 28%.
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Why we’re excited about them: Simplifying health care decisions while improving the quality of care for patients — what’s not to love?
InnSight Technology, Inc — InnSight Technology utilizes a multidisciplinary team composed of ophthalmologists, engineers, designers, and business experts to create novel ophthalmic diagnostic devices. Currently, they are focused on the development of a hand-held tool that can be used to change the current standard for tear film testing. In addition, it provides a platform technology that can be used to expand to other tear film biomarkers and other fluids. They have advanced the project from proof of concept to early prototype and have collected clinical data that shows the precision of their device, called the OcuCheck.
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Why we’re excited about them: The Ocucheck device is the first point-of-care diagnostic device to provide quantitative measures of tear film biomarkers for dry eye. Deployment of the device will make eye-exams more convenient for patients and doctors, leading to improved care management.
Noctem Health — Modernizing behavioral sleep care to serve all clinicians and their patients. NOCTEM® eliminates the hassles of traditional behavioral sleep treatments while you maintain the quality and continuity of care for your patients.
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Why we’re excited about them: Sleep disorders are at the intersection of a host of chronic conditions. Noctem offers a modern, scientific-based approach to improving sleep which will greatly improve patients’ lives and minimize health care spending on chronic conditions.
Respair, Inc. — Respair is currently undergoing prototype development and testing for a novel endotracheal tube designed to reduce ventilator-associated events (VAE). We have previously completed concept validation through 50+ stakeholder interviews in addition to developing a business hypothesis, submitting a preliminary patent through the University of Pittsburgh for our design, and completing a preliminary regulatory pathway assessment. We are currently finalizing our incorporation status in addition to utilizing ISO standards to complete bench testing on animal and human trachea models to further validate and refine the design of our endotracheal tube prototype.
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Why we’re excited about them: Endotracheal tubes haven’t changed for decades and the failure in these products leads to ventricular associated pneumonia. Respair’s novel take on endotracheal tubes will reduce complications with intubation and decrease patient hospitalization time.
