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The GeekWire Awards finalists for Health Innovation of the Year are dominated by ventures that aim to outwit cancer with groundbreaking new technologies. The contenders range from a newly formed startup to a leading U.S. cancer institute and companies in between. Joining the cohort is a business with technology to help healthcare providers better manage appointments and access to providers.
This awards category recognizes pioneering health, life science, biotechnology or medical breakthroughs that hold great promise for improving peoples’ lives and enhancing the healthcare system.
The finalists are Archon Biosciences, DexCare, Fred Hutch Cancer Center, Talus Bioscience and Umoja Biopharma.
Last year’s winner was CalmWave, a Seattle health-tech startup that created a system for making sense of the alarms triggered by the devices that monitor hospital ICU patients.
Continue reading for details on each of this year’s finalists, and vote here or below.
Archon Biosciences
Archon Biosciences emerged from stealth last October with $20 million in funding. The Seattle biotech company is running with technology developed in the lab of University of Washington biochemist and Nobel Prize winner David Baker.
Archon’s proprietary protein structures, known as Antibody Cages or AbCs, combine two biomedical tools — naturally occurring antibodies and custom-designed proteins — to create a single new protein structure. These protein structures, or AbCs, are optimized with the aid of generative AI to travel in the body in controllable ways and engage with target cells in a more specific manner.
“What we like to say is, it’s not whether you’re given a drug, it’s how you’re given it,” said CEO and co-founder James Lazarovits. “How it behaves is actually incredibly important. … It’s not only how it’s distributed and retained, but also how it interacts with its target.”
DexCare
Health tech startup DexCare built a software platform that helps healthcare providers manage their system’s capacity and schedule appointments.
The Seattle business was launched by Providence to help with digital patient acquisition for its same-day care business, Providence Express Care Virtual. DexCare spun out from the healthcare network’s digital innovation group in 2021.
“We help extend the capacity of our customers’ existing resources, with more intelligent matching and load balancing orchestration,” CEO Derek Streat told GeekWire in 2023. “That extends their capacity by about 40% without having to add new resources.”
Fred Hutch
Fred Hutch Cancer Center is the lead organization in an artificial intelligence collaboration to discover insights in data gathered by Fred Hutch and fellow leading research institutions.
The Cancer AI Alliance also includes the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, and two Johns Hopkins institutions: the Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center and the Whiting School of Engineering. The alliance is partnering with tech giants Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Deloitte and NVIDIA for funding and technical support.
“This enables us to have access to the very best tools in AI, to be able to use the incredibly rich data that exists in all of our centers,” said Dr. Tom Lynch, Fred Hutch president, announcing the effort in October. “We hope this is just the start. We hope this is not just four centers. We hope that we bring in many more of the nation’s top cancer centers in this process.”
Talus Bioscience
Inspired by fellow biotech researchers who went on to found their own Seattle startups, Alex Federation and Lindsay Pino launched Talus Bioscience in 2020.
The company has developed a platform that enables the discovery of compounds that affect transcription factors, key proteins that interact with DNA and turn genes on and off. Many transcription factors are implicated in cancer, which results from aberrant gene activity, and other diseases.
But many transcription factors are considered “undruggable,” Federation told GeekWire in 2022. When isolated from cells, “they kind of just fall apart. You can’t do structural biology. You can’t do the normal experiments that you would in drug discovery.” Talus has developed a way to purify transcription factors while keeping them intact.
Umoja Biopharma
Umoja Biopharma is developing a technology that retools a patient’s immune system in vivo, or within their own body, to generate cancer-fighting cells. The biotech company launched in 2019 and is working to commercialize its CAR-T cell immunotherapy treatments.
The technology was developed at Seattle Children’s Research Institute and Purdue University. Umoja has one drug in a Phase 1 trial, and others that are preclinical.
“Generating CAR-T cells directly in vivo is the future of immunotherapy treatment, bringing the hope and promise of CAR-T cell therapies to more patients without the burdens of long delays, supply chain constraints, and the toxicities associated with lympho-depleting chemotherapy,” said Scott Myers, Umoja’s board chairman, in a January funding announcement.
The GeekWire Awards recognize the top innovators and companies in Pacific Northwest technology. Finalists in this category and others were selected based on community nominations, along with input from GeekWire Awards judges. Community voting across all categories will continue until March 23, combined with feedback from judges to determine the winner in each category.
We’ll announce the winners on April 30 at the GeekWire Awards, presented by Astound Business Solutions. There are a limited number of half-table and full-table sponsorships available to attend the event. Contact our events team at [email protected] to reserve a spot for your team today.
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