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Colorado BioScience Association is thrilled to announce the companies selected to present at the Rocky Mountain Life Sciences Investor and Partnering Conference in Vail this September 13 and 14.
Our presenting companies represent the future of life-saving health innovation from the Rocky Mountain West. They will pitch to angel investors, VCs, and strategic partners from major financial hubs.
Meet the Presenting Companies:
At Aesthetics Biomedical (ABM), we make people look younger and feel better about their skin’s appearance. Our patented products allow physicians and med spas to customize personalized treatments for their patients, ensuring better outcomes.
Funding Sought: $15M
Disease affects not just one protein in a cell but thousands. Arpeggio embraces the complexity of biology by defining a drug's impact on hundreds of thousands of RNA molecules at once. This allows us to accurately predict whether a molecule could be an effective therapy. By scaling our transcriptomics platform, we're gearing up to accelerate the pace and efficiency of drug discovery and find new therapies for challenging diseases like drug-resistant cancer.
Funding Sought:
Aspero Medical is focused on improving gastrointestinal endoscopy for the patient and physician. Our differentiated products improve endoscopy while providing financial incentives for providers, improving patient outcomes, and reducing the total cost of care. Our first product, the patented Ancora Pillar Balloon Overtube, allows endoscopists to go further, faster, during small bowel enteroscopy. Ancora achieves better grip on mucosa without injury, enabling scope advancement for deep visualization, better diagnostic procedure stability, & seamless integration with existing procedure workflow. This leads to reduced procedure time, sedation & frustration, with improved patient throughput & lab profitability. Our second product, C-Tube, improves current colonoscopy screenings and enables advanced endoscopy procedures that are currently referred for colorectal surgery (at higher cost and greater patient morbidity). Features include: 1) split overtube design allowing for intraoperative use, being attached mid-procedure, in an on-demand manner; 2) integrated working channels enabling additional tools at surgical site; and 3) C-shaped Pillar balloon for effective stabilization.
Funding Sought: $5M
The COVID-19 pandemic has introduced the convenience of at-home diagnostics to the masses. However, over the course of the pandemic, at-home tests have developed a reputation for poor accuracy due to the “sensitivity gap” that exists between at-home and laboratory-run tests. This is because the technology most at-home tests are based on (lateral flow assays) has largely not been updated in 60 years. Our mission is to “bridge the sensitivity gap” and bring laboratory-quality tests to low-cost devices that be run anywhere from the doctor’s office to the privacy of your own home for a growing panel of diseases including STDs, strep throat, influenza, COVID-19, and heart disease. This is achieved through the development of the Capillary Driven Immunoassay (CaDI) technology that allows us to integrate all steps of an accurate and robust laboratory-run assay within a low-cost, easy to manufacture system that looks and feels like existing lateral flow assays. Ultimately our mission is to bring the power, reproducibility, and accuracy of laboratory tests to at-home testing for a suite of pathogens and disease states allowing patients expanded access to their own diagnostic data.
Funding Sought: $2.5M
CaliberMRI's measurement science made easy. CaliberMRI is on a mission to standardize quantitative Magnetic Resonance Imaging (qMRI). MRI is a powerful tool for screening, diagnosis and treatment monitoring in the fields of cancer, stroke, MS, and other diseases. Traditionally, MRI has been used in a qualitative manner, relying on gray scale contrast to interpret tissue conditions. qMRI provides quantitative measurements of soft tissue characteristics. Such measurements aid clinicians with screening and treatment monitoring using tissue health biomarkers to measure and detect disease. CaliberMRI provides an integrated hardware/software platform to ensure qMRI measurements are accurate, repeatable and reproducible. Our phantoms (physical calibration objects) contain ground truth tissue mimics traceable to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), and our software has been rigorously tested by groups such as the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA). Our platform provides value to researchers, clinical trialists, clinicians, and ultimately, patients, and enables data accuracy across sites and over time.
Funding Sought: $4M
Ceria's platform drug portfolio is directed at multiple indications characterized by dysregulation of the inflammatory and healing processes by exploiting and correcting a pathway common to inflammatory conditions with significant clinical impact and consequences and for which there are very limited clinical options. Areas of active product development are directed to inflammation the lungs caused by pathogenic infections, exposure to noxious inhaled chemical agents and mechanical trauma including ventilator-induced lung injury; non-healing skin ulcers; and gastrointestinal conditions including inflammatory bowel disease and Crohn's disease. In aggregate these conditions comprise >20 million affected person in the US alone. Patients’ acute lung inflammation from pathogenic infections, thoracic and airway trauma and inhaled noxious chemicals result in >200,000 critical care hospitalizations with a >40% mortality rate. Patients with non-healing diabetic foot ulcers (>15 million US) constitute 40% of all diabetic admissions and is the leading cause of non-traumatic amputations (>75,000 per year). IBD and Crohn's affect ~1.1 million US patients and are extremely debilitating
Funding Sought: $5M
Certus is building "smart" end-vascular catheters to provide precision blood pressure and blood flow control to address the unmet needs of patients suffering from catastrophic hemorrhage, cardiac arrest, and blood pressure instability following strokes.
Funding Sought: $10M
ClinOne provides a suite of technologies to research sites, patients, and caregivers to increase clinical trial awareness and retention - two significant challenges for pharmaceutical sponsors, adding significant cost and delays in commercializing a pharmaceutical drug. ClinOne is on a mission to power adaptive clinical trial experiences. We improve trial participation by more easily connecting people, simplifying site processes, and supporting families worldwide.
Funding Sought: $8 - $10M
Heart disease is the most common cause of adult mortality and sudden cardiac death from ventricular tachycardia (VT) is the most likely diagnosis. When medications fail to control it, the origin of the VT in the ventricular muscle is ablated using a catheter delivering radiofrequency heat energy that destroys the cells originating the VT. This catheter enters through the bloodstream to the inner endocardial wall of the ventricle directed only by 2D flouroscopy and electical mapping. This approach fails 30% of the time because the origin of the VT is on the outer epicardial surface of the heart. Current epicardial "off label" ablations have well documented navigation, safety and efficacy concerns. CardioScout is a new minimally invasive single use catheter platform for ablation of VT sites on the epicardial surface of the beating heart. This platform will deliver ablation catheters already familiar to providers to the origin of the VT on the epicardium under direct vision with agile navigation. Safety is assured by avoiding critical cardiac structures and being outside of the bloodstream. Additional protective procedures are no longer required enhancing efficiency and efficacy.
Funding Sought: $5M
There is currently no inexpensive, non-endoscopic, non-invasive, upper gastrointestinal (GI) sampling technique for children and adults. Coupling such routine, yet localized, sampling capability with new molecular, genomic, and microbiome assays for screening, monitoring and diagnostics would substantially enhance personalized medicine approaches in a wide variety of areas including food allergy, metabolic syndrome, GERD, gut microbiome, esophageal cancer, Eosinophilic Esophagitis, and other conditions within the GI, nutrition, allergy or microbiome spaces.
Funding Sought: $10M
Flourish Medical, LLC (FM) has a patented medical device for the treatment of Stress Urinary Incontinence (SUI). Imagine wetting your pants whenever you coughed, laughed, sneezed, were jogging or lifted a heavy grocery bag. SUI is the unintentional loss of urine during activity when pressure (stress) is put on your bladder, causing you to leak urine. SUI affects 17% (15M) adult US women (150M WW) and is an $8B US market. Options for management of SUI can be divided in to 4 general categories, absorbent products, behavioral changes, vaginal pessaries, and surgery. Currently, nearly 90% manage SUI with absorbent products and spend $44/month and 85% wished they could stop leaks instead of absorbing them. Kimberly-clark and P&G have 70% market share in the incontinence market and state that the major unmet need is a single-use, disposable device comfortable to insert and remove. They noted that 73% could feel more active if they could prevent leaks, 49% are embarrassed, 40% said it makes them feel old. However, instead of giving women what they want, the leaders focused on: Absorption control, odor control, body fit and aesthetic look.
Funding Sought: $2M
ForCast's mission is to develop an effective treatment for periprosthetic joint infection (PJI), a severely debilitating and sometimes fatal condition that affects tens of thousands of joint replacement patients annually. By developing a low-cost, implantable infusion pump that can be co-marketed with approved antibiotics, ForCast aims to treat PJI directly in the affected joint as part of simpler surgical procedure vs. the current standard-of-care which can include multiple surgeries and replacement of prosthetic implants. PJI has a 5-year mortality rate comparable to some forms of cancer (20-25%) with another 5-10% of surviving patients requiring amputation. The economic burden of PJI on the US healthcare system alone is north of $2 billion and growing.
Funding Sought: $5M - $6M
There are 1.2 million cases of cancer in the US each year. Of the patients that are treated, approximately half of them will experience relapse, and over 600,000 will die each year. Early detection of cancer and cancer recurrence saves lives and healthcare costs. While there have been major advances in the use of liquid biopsy assays to speed the diagnosis and detection of cancer, current methods perform poorly when disease burden is low. This means that in the early stages of cancer, when detection is critical to improve survival, cancer can go undiagnosed, leading to disease progression. The low limit of detection of existing liquid biopsy assays also means that recurrence after treatment is often not detected until the tumors are large enough to be visible with conventional imaging, at which point the disease is much more difficult to treat.
Funding Sought:
There are still no effective treatments for chronic wounds, a particular problem for diabetics but also present in other patients. Systemic inflammation in these patients leads to issues with vascularization and healing, and chronic wounds are prone to infection. Today’s wound dressings increase inflammation by interacting with the tissue that is trying to heal. There is currently only one approved biologic on the market for diabetic ulcers (Regranex) with mixed clinical results. We have developed a proprietary hydrogel that prevents the foreign body response and can promote anti-inflammatory and pro-healing conditions. These gels could have applicability across multiple wound types. GelSana’s first commercial hydrogel will target chronic wounds; initial testing on diabetic wounds in mice have shown substantially decreased healing time. As an added benefit, these gels can be formulated to deliver therapeutics in a sustained manner over time, eliminating the need to continually reopen the wound bed and reapply ointments. These gels will be a valuable tool to heal wounds that are showing limited response to other healing solutions.
Funding Sought: $8M
Currently, there is no effective liver function test available for the liver. The liver enzyme panel referred to as "Liver Function Tests" measures variable liver damage. Biopsies have been the gold standard to understand disease severity in liver disease, but companies developing drugs to treat liver disease are losing billions by errors in biopsy reads due to sampling error and reading error (pathologists can't agree on fibrosis scores). There are many diagnostics companies developing new noninvasive technologies to assess biopsy metrics, but these are surrogates of surrogates and are measuring the results of damage, not the actual functional health of the liver. Our data has shown that measuring liver function with HepQuant correlates more with detecting risk for outcomes than biopsy fibrosis, changes in liver function are more predictive of disease progression and outcomes, and functional improvement in response to therapy may be indicative of a lower risk for outcomes. Data shows HepQuant's tests are highly reproducible so can detect a significant response in a short time frame in a small number of patients in response to liver interventions.
Funding Sought: $20M - $100M
Half of lung cancer cases are diagnosed at Stage IV when survival is 10%. Incidental detection of lung nodules provides the greatest opportunity to identify lung cancer at an earlier stage when survival is much higher. Unfortunately for patients, half of the nodules present on a chest X-ray are missed during routine care. Every miss is a loss of $100k+ in hospital revenue from treatment and exposes providers to medical malpractice claims.
Funding Sought: $1.5M
We deliver simple, fast, laboratory-quality testing almost anywhere. We aim to bring diagnostic testing outside the lab, transforming health by delivering the answers needed to make better decisions, faster. Know now. Act now.
Funding Sought:
We're developing a robust, nurse-centric, operational decision support SAAS platform that brings much-needed automation to antiquated work processes, addressing the #1 issue facing healthcare leaders today, nurse staffing.
Funding Sought: $2M - $2.5M
Surgery can be inaccurate and there are limited means to confirm the accuracy of the surgery intraoperatively. We provide direct 3D visualization during surgery to provide surgical guidance during implant placement or biopsy and to provide quality control to confirm that the surgery happened per plan.
Funding Sought: $10M
Patients diagnosed with a brain tumor have few treatment options. In the case of glioblastoma, the deadliest brain cancer, patients are offered therapies that provide minimal survival benefit (no more than 2.5 months) and are accompanied with severe side effects. Breast and lung cancers are the two cancers that most frequently metastasize into the brain. Effective treatment options for brain metastasis patients are limited to small subsets of these patient populations. While survival outcomes have greatly improved in many cancers, the brain cancer space is lagging. We know why this is. The body’s natural defense for protecting the brain prevent penetration of what would otherwise be life-saving therapies.
Funding Sought: $3.5M
RheumaGen is developing a pipeline of HLA gene-editing therapies to cure rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and other major autoimmune diseases. Human leukocyte antigen (HLA) is the main genetic factor related to autoimmune diseases, accounting for approximately half of known genetic predisposition. RA is a chronic disease that occurs in approximately 1% of the world’s population and leads to extensive joint destruction and increases the risk of cardiovascular and respiratory diseases, resulting in significantly increased early mortality. Treatment requires consistent and aggressive tactics to control symptoms, manage pain, and stop disease progression. Severe cases of RA are most commonly treated with expensive biologic drugs, such as Humira, which while effective for some patients, globally suppress the immune system. These biologics also leave patients at risk for infection and are associated with severe adverse effects. Furthermore, approximately 6%-21% of RA patients are refractory to current therapies. Billions of dollars of direct healthcare costs are associated with the treatment of RA annually. Safer, more affordable treatment options, therefore, are needed urgently.
Funding Sought: $20M - $30M
Securing breakthroughs for a nearly $5B+ problem. Practitioners who need to secure a patients' life-sustaining medical tube only have two choices: tape, which is time-consuming and often fails; or tube holders, which just don't hold up against real-world external forces. In health care, a significant threat to ventilated patient safety is unplanned extubation (UE), which occurs when a patient or other external force pulls an inadequately stabilized breathing tube out of the airway. It's a common and costly problem, occurring in 7% of adults, 8% of pediatric patients, and 18% of neonatal patients—and worse, it is also associated with 33,000 preventable deaths annually. 120k Adult ICU patients experience UE in the US at an average cost of $41k per event, leading to $5B in additional healthcare costs annually. Many smooth medical tubes and catheters are also not adequately secured by today's standards of care. Chest tubes are commonly placed to drain air, blood, or other fluids. More than 1M patients are treated with a chest tube annually and 26k have CT dislodgements. Addressable US market is 27M units, global is 60M+ units annually, 7% CAGR.
Funding Sought: $20M
Chronic Rhinosinusitis (CRS) ranks among the most expensive and pervasive medical problems with over 50M American adults suffering from this condition every year. Surgical intervention is required for the worst five percent of cases (1 million/year) but when performed has poor curative outlook (20-50% revision rate). CRS results from obstruction of sinus ostia and subsequent accumulation of diseased mucus in the sinuses rather than steady-state elimination. Surgery is done to reopen the sinus ostia but in 20-50% of sinus operations, complications from poor wound healing leads to recurring chronic sinusitis and reoperation. Current methods to keep the ostia open post-operatively cause swelling, excessive bleeding, pain, and eventual recurrent sinus blockage. To maintain open ostia, minimal blood flow must occur to heal the surgical wound without allowing scar tissue to form. There is no product available today that provides this type of wound healing for the sinus ostium.
Funding Sought: $1.25M
STAQ Pharma is a CGMP Pharmaceutical Manufacturing facility headquartered in Denver, Colorado. We make ready to administer syringes and IV bags for hospitals. We serve as an outsourcing partner for hospital pharmacy departments to provide common drugs used in every day procedures. We manufacture from API as well as commercially available drug product, solving drug shortage and labor shortage issues for our hospital partners. Without our industry, hospitals would be unable to service their patients on a daily basis. If you are a patient in a Colorado hospital you will likely be treated with our products and over the last two years there were multiple instances where STAQ Pharma was the only option for many drugs used for sedation and pain control during and after surgery.
Funding Sought: $30M
Think Bioscience is reimagining synthetic biology by using living systems to guide the design and assembly of better medicines. The unique approach to drug discovery combines applied microbiology, enzymology, and computational science to develop small-molecule therapeutics against elusive targets. The company recently raised $17M in an oversubscribed Seed round to expand its drug discovery platform and advance its internal drug development programs.
Funding Sought: Recently completed Seed. Interested in meeting potential partners and investor for Series A round.
Validus is developing the first cell therapy targeting bacterial infections. We believe the current strategy to produce novel small molecule chemical antibiotics is broke therapeutically and economically. Validus' approach leverages knowledge of immunomodulatory capabilities of stem cells to produce an innate immune stimulatory reaction to resolve infections. Using stem cells to increase innate immune activity at the site of infection will not result in emergence of new resistance.
Funding Sought: $10M
Current drug delivery methods, such as adeno-associated viruses (AAV) and lipid nanoparticles (LPN) have limited cargo capacity and therefore cannot deliver large therapeutics, genes or gene editing complexes. Many of these current delivery methods also have associated safety concerns. Vesicle Therapeutics is a biotechnology startup focused on developing engineered extracellular vesicle therapeutics. We are developing a platform technology called Gectosomes that can encapsulate therapeutic enzymes, nucleic acids, and gene editing complexes and, due to the fusogenic properties of Gectosomes, deliver them more efficiently into target cells. Vesicle Therapeutics is opportunistically looking for industry partners interested in utilizing our platform for specific fields of use in gene therapy and gene editing delivery. Additionally, we aim to develop our own targeted biologics to treat specific human diseases such as hypercholesterolemia and cancer tumor microenvironment utilizing our novel, proprietary delivery platform.
Funding Sought: $25M
Vibliome develops small molecule kinase inhibitors with improved properties over currently available therapeutics. It can be difficult to target specific kinase enzymes in the body because the 500+ proteins in the family are structurally similar. As a result, most of the drugs currently approved hit many off-targets, causing dose-limiting toxicities. Vibliome develops inhibitors that bind in a certain way which improves drug selectivity and opens up new targets for pharmaceutical intervention.
Funding Sought: $50M
In over 120 customer interviews with life science professionals, dentists, orthodontists, medical device manufacturers, and patients, we found that there is a great need to disrupt how personalized healthcare devices are fabricated. This is most immediately obvious in the dental aligner market. Today, each aligner is manufactured by 3D printing a mold of the patient's teeth, post-processing and treating the printed mold, casting the aligner using that mold, trimming the aligner and shipping the aligner to the dentist or patient. This leads to an average cost of $540 per aligner treatment for the aligner manufacturer, $1,800 for the dentist and $5,500 to the patient. Through the printing of sacrificial molds which require support structures, waste is generated both in the materials and time it takes for technicians to handle the parts. Therefore, the time to manufacture an aligner is too long and more costly than it should be. The molds used to create the aligners are single-use disposable products and 20 to 40 are created for each patient over the course of their treatment, which is a slow, wasteful, and unsustainable process.
Funding Sought: $2M
Vona Oncology is committed to developing lifesaving medicines for patients affected by aggressive cancers. Cancer remains the single-largest and most significant health challenge of our time. Our lead drug candidate, VDX-111, is being developed in pre-clinical studies for the treatment of triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC), which affects approximately 20% of women diagnosed with breast cancer and for which there are very few effective treatment options available. While chemotherapy and some newly approved immunotherapy options have become the mainstay of treatment, not all patients experience a meaningful response necessitating demand for new options. Of those who do respond, many often experience harmful side effects, disease relapse, treatment resistance and/or disease progression. Our goal is to validate that VDX-111 represents a promising new treatment option for TNBC. Vona Oncology has obtained an NCI Fast-Track SBIR grant for moving VDX-111 into clinical trials. Our IND-enabling studies are designed, and anticipated to, demonstrate strong efficacy in TNBC tumor models, with low toxicity of VDX-111 in animals. PK/PD studies will also be conducted under this grant mechanism.
Funding Sought: $5M - $10M
Neurologic disease and brain trauma affect the lives of over 100 million patients in the US alone, accounting for over $1.3 trillion of nondiscretionary healthcare spending every year. Unfortunately, this market is challenged by failed drug trials, ineffective treatments, and delayed diagnoses. A critical missing piece is the lack of low-cost blood testing products that can be used as tools to enable breakthrough discoveries in research and drug development (where failures to advance drugs to the market have been notorious). Molecular biomarkers for neurodegeneration in the aging, diseased, or traumatized brain can also be useful for diagnosis, monitoring of disease activity, and measuring therapeutic effects. Typically, these molecules cannot spill directly into the blood stream due to the action of the blood-brain barrier (BBB), but even when the BBB breaks down as a result of trauma or disease, their concentration in serum or plasma is near or below detection limits for standard methods of detection.
Funding Sought: $1.5M
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