| DEALFLOWUPDATE Issue #47. Thursday, December 23 |
| Hello Everyone, Happy holidays from me and the team. In what has been a great year for Zoic Capital, thank you for reading, subscribing and sharing with colleagues. For this edition of the Zoic newsletter, we’ll be covering some new fields as well as some familiar ones. This includes blood collection combined with blood testing, addressing biofilms in infections, infectious diseases, home dialysis and diabetes care. -Neal If this is your first issue, please subscribe and consider sharing with others. Additionally, we welcome news from our readers, if you’re up to something interesting, let us know. Email chad@zoiccapital.com |
Dealflow Complimentary Innovation We’ve covered blood testing, especially at-home, many times. New diagnostic hardware and tests are critical, but the collection itself is also important for adoption. Consumers may not want to, or be proficient at, collecting their own blood at home, especially at the volumes required of most tests. Even a pinprick can be burdensome for repeat tests. New blood collection devices have shown to be able to collect the required volume of blood in non-invasive (or at least minimally invasive) forms and without pain. This is a very important complementary innovation to the more glamorous diagnostic devices. Read more Reducing infections, particularly hospital acquired bacterial infections, is always a constant innovation goal. What is just as important, though, and not as known is reducing the biofilms these bacteria produce. Bacteria can produce a protective layer around themselves, especially in implanted devices that prevent antibiotics from reaching them. This is even more important with the increase in antibiotic resistant bacteria. There are few drugs that can act against these biofilms, but some new devices have shown promise in reducing these biofilms and thus making antibacterial therapies more effective and requiring lower dose. Read more Infectious diseases often don’t get much attention until a new outbreak occurs or a new virulent one arises. For example, Zika is the most recent disease to gain attention. New diagnostics are being developed for early, mass screening. Zika is only one example, though, of the rise in RNA-based infectious diseases that are seen around the world. These diseases are particularly difficult to deal with as there are few vaccines or therapies that can target diseases of this type due to their effectiveness in subverting healthy cells. Read more We have covered at-home dialysis once before as a large, growing market with little innovation. Dialysis machines are the same as they have been for many years, with at-home, peritoneal dialysis being the most significant new device. New devices are still incremental in nature, although with some benefit to patient health and quality of life. For example, a new peritoneal dialysis device allows dialysis to be conducted even when the patient is mobile, while allowing for less dialysis time and more efficient fluid exchange. Read more Lastly, diabetes care is also like dialysis in that it is a massive growing market with not much major innovation. There are some new devices for automating insulin monitoring and dosing, but these are still incremental changes. For example, this new monitoring system allows for automated monitoring and delivery for dosing and was just granted breakthrough status by the FDA. In this case, the improvements especially in automating the care can be significant enough to justify this status. Read more What We’re Reading INC42 Is The Funding Winter Here? Not Really, Say Startups, VCs CRUNCHBASE Looking Back At The Largest Venture Rounds Of The Decade PITCHBOOK VC’s Decade In Data: How The 2010s Reshaped a Market BUSINESS INSIDER Digital Health Ecosystem Report Connect With Zoic Capital |
| The Biweekly Dealflow Update, curated by the team at Zoic Capital. |
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