After much deliberation and consideration, the cohort for the NEMIC Foundation's 2022-23 Activate Program has been selected! While applications were only open for a brief amount of time, we were overwhelmed with both the quantity and quality of startup applicants interested in participating in this accelerator.

Thank you to everyone who was able to join Team NEMIC and Veranex for The Med Tech Meetup on August 3rd! We were thrilled to see so many familiar faces and many new ones.

It was a night packed with tasty drinks from the Blu Violet Roof Bar, catching up with old friends, and making new connections, all with the stunning Providence skyline as a backdrop.

The NEMIC Foundation has just wrapped up another program with one of our earliest global partners, ActnerLab. Located in South Korea, ActnerLab is a business incubator and entrepreneurship education hub for Korean hardware startups with the goal of international expansion.

When you donate to the Foundation for the New England Medical Innovation Center, you support innovators and entrepreneurs in Med Tech.

Ultimately, we help usher technologies to market so that they achieve their visions; which include advancing the patient and caregiver experience, creating more environmentally sustainable solutions, improving outcomes, mitigating risks, reducing costs, and much more.

When an infant under four weeks of age shows a fever, the standard of care is a spinal tap to rule out Meningitis. This infection is dangerous, and delays in diagnosis can lead to an extended hospital stay or even death. The traditional constraint method consists of physically holding the baby in a 'crunched' position during the spinal tap procedure, which requires several people to keep the baby perfectly still while the tap is administered.

Aurie has built technical prototypes of the catheter system and tested them in microbiology labs at the University of Notre Dame and conducted human factors testing of interactive prototypes with catheter users in Houston, TX. The startup has received several grants to support its vision, including from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Institute of Disability, Independent Living and Rehabilitation Research.

Lenoss Medical has entered the scene to introduce a disruptive new method of vertebral body augmentation. Lenoss Medical is a start-up with an innovative, biological bone implant technology for the treatment of painful spinal fractures. When natural, biological bone implants are used in weak, fractured vertebrae, a regenerative process can occur: new bone building, and repair of the fractured vertebrae may occur.

Today we're highlighting a longtime program fellow of ours, Lura Health.

Lura's mission is to provide everyone with continual streams of critical health data, anytime, anywhere, to prevent health emergencies, manage chronic diseases, and achieve health goals.

Saliva is an incredible diagnostic fluid and is used to test over 1,000 health conditions. However, there is no way to continually analyze saliva as it relies on one-time sampling and lab analysis.

There is a movement of Fintech startups that have broken out of their sector to fight the high costs of healthcare in the United States.

Part of what makes the American healthcare system so expensive is the reliance on a fee-for-service (FFS) model of healthcare provision. A doctor provides a service such as prescribing a drug, test, or procedure and then receives payment. Healthcare industry experts point at the FFS model as the reason behind the over-prescription of tests, procedures, and drugs.

As we head into the strategy season for education-focused groups like NEMIC, we took a moment to reflect on the past year which has seen unplanned, but significant progress for our Med Tech community.

At the end of 2020, NEMIC was asked by Dr. Eugenio Fernandez of the Asthenis Pharmacy, a NEMIC Activate Fellow, to help build out a COVID-19 vaccination delivery program in Central Falls, Rhode Island.

a blog post by Managing Partner, Aidan Petrie

In the years that I have taught innovation and worked with many hundreds of companies, big and small, we hear over and over again that we have to go in search of problems to solve as a route to innovation.