Sheba startups scoop over US$110 million to develop new healthcare technology

ISRAEL – Sheba Medical Center, Israel’s largest hospital, has announced that six companies from its ARC Innovation Center raised more than US$110 million in 2021.

All companies are founded on Sheba-invented and developed technology, with Sheba MedTech startups raising over a billion dollars in the last decade.

The ARC (Accelerate Redesign Collaborate) Innovation Center, led by Professor Eyal Zimlichman, Sheba’s Chief Innovation & Transformation Officer, aims to introduce new technologies into the hospital and community ecosystems in order to revolutionize patient care.

Under one roof, ARC allows for the seamless integration of innovators, scientists, startups, high-level developers, large corporate companies, investors, and academia.

The center focuses on digital health technologies such as precision medicine, big data, artificial intelligence (AI), predictive analytics, telemedicine, and mobile health, and all six companies are based on technology invented and developed by Sheba.

“The ARC Innovation Center has been focusing on ground-breaking, innovative technologies with a prime directive to redesign healthcare. Our commercialization efforts enable us to expand the reach of these technologies and create global impact on a wide scale,” Zimlichman explained.

Sheba’s six companies that secured the investments

Aidoc (US$66 million), a provider of artificial intelligence solutions that support and enhance physicians’ diagnostic power. Aidoc’s solutions use AI to analyze medical images immediately after acquisition and notify radiologists of cases with suspected findings directly in their workflows.

Aidoc has seven FDA-cleared solutions and has received numerous awards, including the prestigious UCSF ‘Best New Health Application of AI’ award and being named one of TIME’s 50 most brilliant companies.

BELKIN Laser (US$13.75 million), a clinical-stage medical device company developing a disruptive automated one-second laser treatment for glaucoma.

The camera-guided system, developed by Prof. Michael Belkin, enables precise contact-free procedure via a sophisticated image processing algorithm that automatically defines the treatment location and tracks the movement of the eye.

Starget Pharma (US$10 million), a biopharmaceutical start-up that develops products for the diagnosis and targeted treatment of cancer using radioactive radiation.

Starget creates one-of-a-kind molecules that act as a vector for selectively delivering imaging materials and treatment to tumor tissue. Starget’s flagship research product is a somatostatin-like peptide developed by Sheba Hospital and Tel Aviv University and licensed exclusively to the company.

Append Medical (US$7.6 million) is the developer of the next generation transcatheter Left Atrial Appendage (LAA) closure system.

The Append Medical procedure is intended to prevent blood clot leakage by achieving complete LAA closure, to avoid device-related thromboembolism by leaving as little foreign material at the closure site as possible, and to be a simple procedure with fewer LAA pre-procedure measurements.

The Append Medical solution is currently in pre-clinical in-vivo trials and is intended to become a differentiated solution in the LAA closure market, which is expected to reach $25 billion in the next few years.

Innovalve Bio Medical (US$7.2 million), an early-stage medical-device company developing catheter-based heart valve therapies. Professor Ehud Raanani, director of Sheba’s Cardiovascular and Thoracic Center, and Dr. Boris Orlev, head of Sheba’s Mitral Valve Surgery Unit, developed the inventions and patents that gave rise to the company.

To help treat patients with heart disease, Innovalve has developed an artificial mitral valve that can be replaced using a minimally invasive catheter.

The company has successfully completed animal experiments and has received US-FDA approval for a US clinical trial, as well as approval in other territories.

TechsoMed (US$7 million), a miotech company developing BioTrace, the world’s first real-time monitoring and control systems for ablation procedures. The technology has applications in oncology (tumor ablation), cardiology (heart arrhythmia), and pain management (radiofrequency neurotomy).

By integrating with a standard ultrasound device, the breakthrough technology improves thermal ablation through real-time AI and image analysis.

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