London highlights & May favorites

Plus, companies as creative acts, and promising new respiratory drugs

1. Since my last newsletter, I traveled to London for LifeArc activities, a day with the team at Closed Loop Medicine, and some time exploring the thriving and impressive London healthtech scene. Saw some old friends, made a handful of new ones, played a little tennis, and enjoyed a beautiful few days of weather before the rain moved in.

2. One of my favorite meetings was a visit to Entia, led by Toby Basey-Fisher. The company recently achieved a world-first with the UK regulatory approval of their at-home complete blood count analyzer, opening a wealth of opportunities to improve cancer care and treatment. My family has had more than its share of challenging traverses of cancer. Atop the list of logistical inconveniences is the pre-treatment blood work that assesses your readiness to receive another round of therapy. Today, you turn up early for the tests, wait to be called to the lab, have your blood drawn, then await the results and the last minute go/no-go decision. It all takes hours. Occasionally, treatment is called off and you head back home to try again another day. Toby and team have done something remarkable in bringing this forward and into the home.

3. I also met a few exited and repeat founders, many of whom are starting new projects. I was struck by how much each is designing (and constraining) how their next business will be built and behave. I’ve seen this creative theme increasingly online, too. For example, Michael Karnjanaprakorn, ex-founder of Skillshare, has recently been writing about building ambitious but calm companies.

4. Personally, I’ve been wondering what healthtech founders can learn from the music industry, and how albums (and films) get made. That’s recently meant reading a lot of the remembrances to Steve Albini, a musician best known as a recording engineer / producer, and checking out what Nicholas Weinstock is doing with Invention Studios.

5. It does seem that life science startups often follow the album and film model. Early on, after the creative scientific insight, they’re not so much businesses as they are a way of doing things consisting of a big set of processes. Run that program and (if the bets are right) you get a valuable drug at the end of it. Explains how/why the industry can recombine individuals so effectively.

6. Another angle on new company creation: My friend and journalist Kathleen Gallagher, who’s executive director of the 5 Lakes Institute, interviewed venture firm Ag Ventures Alliance CEO Spencer Stensrude about its emergence from an Iowan farmer-owned cooperative. Lessons for health system investors in here (+ what an investment portfolio).

7. Disappointed to miss this year’s American Thoracic Society annual meeting and the companion Respiratory Innovation Summit, which is a full day of early-stage healthtech and life science company presentations and activities. Still catching up on announcements, including a bunch of new drugs. For example:

   1. An experimental drug, brensocatib, from Insmed successfully reduced pulmonary exacerbations among patients with bronchiectasis, in a closely watched Phase 3 trial.

   2. An inhaled, mRNA-based drug from Arcturus Therapeutics improved lung function in patients with cystic fibrosis, according to a preliminary results from a Phase 1 study.

   3. GSK announced positive results from two Phase 3 trials of depemokimab in adults and adolescents with severe asthma with type-2 inflammation. In both studies the IL-5 inhibitor, an ultra-long-acting biologic with a six-month dosing schedule, reduced the rate of exacerbations.

8. Separately, Eric Topol highlighted promising work published in Nature in which a single injection of engineered T cells induced remission in a mouse model of asthma. Good discussion in the thread about potential applications to eosinophilic diseases more broadly.

9. Two favorite projects to share:

   1. Peter Hames, who I visited last week in Brighton, has just launched a project to build durable, high-quality home appliances, starting with a toaster that lasts 100+ years

      

   2. Artist Vanessa Barragão has been making coral reefs and marine scenes out of textiles and fiber

      vanessabarragao_work

      

      A post shared by @vanessabarragao_work

10. Personally, I continue to write and collect material about how healthtech founders can prepare for and encourage an acquisition. Recently, I’ve started doing interviews with other exited founders to weave in their experience and perspectives.

11. My overview of the respiratory healthtech market is already nearly two months old. Since I posted the first version, I’ve received another 75 companies to check out. Thanks for all the suggestions! I’m working my way through them and adding the best to the list, which I’ll publish in an update.