| | | |  By Casey Ross, Katie Palmer, Mario Aguilar, and Mohana Ravindranath | | | Tech companies go after Alzheimer’s The uncertain future of Aduhelm has left an opening for software and device companies who want to tackle Alzheimer’s disease. While pharma companies continue to struggle with the root cause of the disease, medical technology companies can simply address the symptoms, like agitation, depression, and cognitive decline. Of course, despite a flurry of investment in companies like MedRhythms, Cognito, and others hoping to treat the disease, none have proven that they can improve any meaningful measure for dementia patients. Katie has the whole story. | 5 home health tech trends to watch Tech startups and health care incumbents alike are poised to cash in on what analysts say is an unstoppable shift from providing care in the hospital to aging patients' homes. Medicare's expected to cover 80 million beneficiaries by 2030, and businesses are scrambling to build out the underlying infrastructure for home health care, ranging from durable medical equipment delivery to passive vital sign monitoring to acute care at the patients' bedside. Mohana has a closer look at the home health tech trends drawing investment, including companies building the tech infrastructure to provide acute care at home. | Trading nasal swabs for smart toilets  Public health experts are hunting for less invasive, passive ways to keep tabs on Covid, like wastewater monitoring. Researchers from Stanford suggest smart toilets with automatic sample collection and diagnostics built-in could help make that a sustainable long-term solution. Such “COV-ID” toilets could be installed in highly-trafficked public areas like malls or campuses. When a person sits down to do their business, they can use their phone to scan a QR code and consent to testing. Individuals could quickly get results, and public health experts could use the data to augment surveillance of the virus. Even if such a system could be developed, it would require privacy safeguards, and there’s no guarantee that enough people would participate. The researchers suggest such a platform could be useful beyond the pandemic as “a robust infrastructure for monitoring future novel disease.” (Sheesh. Too soon!) | Increasing access to authoritative health information through video People around the world need better access to high quality health information. That’s why YouTube Health is working with the World Health Organization to make it easier for people to find information from authoritative sources on its platform. New features launched in Japan, India, and Brazil show labels on videos from authoritative sources, and videos from these sources may also be shown in shelves for certain health-related search queries on YouTube. Learn more about YouTube Health’s efforts. | Health tech companies raise $100M+ -
Brightline, which provides behavioral health services for young people, raised $105 million in a Series C round valuing the company at $705 million. The round was led by KKR with participation from GV, Optum Ventures, Oak HC/FT, and others. -
ConcertAI raised a $150 million Series C round from Sixth Street at a valuation of $1.9 billion. -
VivoSense, a startup developing digital biomarkers raised a $25 million Series A led by Perceptive Xontogeny Venture Fund and Debiopharm Innovation Fund. -
Jeenie, a virtual interpretation platform, raised a $9.3 million Series A led by Transformation Capital. -
Hims & Hers announced a deal with primary care provider Carbon Health to facilitate warm handoffs when patients need care for more complex conditions. -
Diagnostics and virtual care provider LetsGetChecked acquired genetic testing provider Veritas Genetics for an undisclosed amount? -
Valar Labs, an AI cancer startup, raised a $4 million seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz. | Personnel file - SteadyMD named Google VP of business operations & strategy and business finance officer Kristen Gil to its board of advisors.
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COTA, a real-world oncology data company, hired Miruna Sasu as chief strategy officer. Previously she worked as head of clinical trial feasibility and data science at Johnson & Johnson and as head of innovation and digital health at Bristol-Myers Squibb. | | | Thanks for reading! More next week,  | | | | Have a news tip or comment? Email Us | |
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