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Biospectal Raises $4.3M Seed Funding Led by Digital Health Investor, SeedLink

Today we are happy to announce the closing of a CHF 4.0M($4.3M) round of seed funding led by digital health investor, SeedLink, with additional funding from LabCorp,  Athensmed, Swiss based Privilege Ventures and other European and US investors. Biospectal will leverage the new funds to scale its OptiBP™ smartphone blood pressure monitoring application and data platform technology worldwide.

The funding we’ve received will accelerate Biospectal’s growth trajectory along with the appointments of Silicon Valley-based, interventional cardiologist and influential serial healthcare innovator, Dr. Fred St. Goar, MD, Tim Juergens, General Manager and co-founder of SeedLink, William Hanlon from LabCorp and Kustaa Piha, successful Health Tech Entrepreneur and Investor from Athensmed to the Biospectal Board of Directors.

Full press releases can be found here:
English
French
German

Biospectal Announces Two Independent Global Health Research and Validation Studies

We’re proud to announce two independent global research and validation studies which integrate the Biospectal OptiBP™ blood pressure measurement app. Currently underway in four low-resource countries, the studies center on the routine measurement and monitoring of blood pressure, assessment of hypertension during pregnancy, and enable global field testing and validation of Biospectal’s OptiBP smartphone app and data platform integration with the WHO’s Digital Antenatal Care module, following WHO SMART guidelines and built on the WHO Open Smart Register Platform (OpenSRP). 

Dr. Anuraj Shankar of University of Oxford, U.K., and Lead Investigator for Community Health at the Eijkman-Oxford Clinical Research Unit, and the Summit Institute for Development in Indonesia had this to say: “The ability for anyone to assess blood pressure accurately with a readily available device such as a smartphone opens the door to personal monitoring of many acute and chronic medical conditions. It’s a massive leap forward in technology toward empowerment for wellness, and crucial in the post Covid-19 world. The synergy with other point-of-care tests and the transition to digital health globally means optimal care for pregnant women experiencing hypertension, and will lead to more healthy mothers and healthy babies.”

The first independent study, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, is underway in three countries — South Africa, Tanzania and Bangladesh — and is concentrated on routine blood pressure measurement and monitoring as well as hypertension disorders during pregnancy. 

The second independent study in Indonesia is being conducted with the Summit Institute for Development (SID) in collaboration with Ona Kenya Limited and is funded through Grand Challenges Canada’s Saving Lives at Birth initiative, with additional backing from USAID, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (NORAD), the Korean International Cooperation Agency (KOICA) and the HRP Special Programme of Research, Development and Research Training in Human Reproduction. The study centers on hypertension disorders during pregnancy, including chronic hypertension, preeclampsia-eclampsia, preeclampsia superimposed on chronic hypertension and gestational hypertension. Findings from the two studies will be available in the first half of 2022.

Biospectal can scale our modern, medical-grade, easy-to-use blood pressure measurement and monitoring OptiBP technology globally with extreme efficiency to any country, at any time. These studies further our ability to transform the global network of smartphones into a connected, clinical-grade blood pressure monitoring platform — democratizing access and bringing the power of remote patient monitoring to people and communities worldwide. Read more about the studies here. 

We are looking for users to help us test our revolutionary smartphone blood pressure solution. If you would like to become an OptiBP™ beta user, click here.

Biospectal Shortlisted as One of Seven Companies to Present at Swiss Medtech Day 2020

Biospectal is honored to be one of only seven Swiss companies shortlisted for presentation at the Swiss Medtech Jury Hearing on 27 July 2020. From this select group, the Jury will nominate three candidates to present their projects on stage during Swiss Medtech Day on 21 September 2020 in Bern.

We are excited to be among such talented and unique companies recognized by Swiss Medtech in 2020 and to share the Biospectal vision for attacking hypertension at global scale exclusively through software on smartphones!

https://www.swissmedtechday.ch/award-shortlist

Biospectal wins the Healthtech Track of the Startup DAYs 2019

Ten startups from Switzerland, Hungary and the UK made it to the finals of the pitch competition and Biospectal won the Health Tech track.

Each company was allowed to present their work in a 100 seconds pitch, without slides.

Biospectal was selected as the winner by the audience! Great achievement, thank you to all who attended.

https://www.startupticker.ch/en/news/may-2019/the-winners-of-the-sud-pitching-competition

Biospectal chosen as an example of an Innovation project supported by Innosuisse

Innosuisse, the Swiss Innovation Agency, has featured Biospectal as a success story in fostering innovation through Swiss technology. The video profile highlights the unique opportunity Biospectal is pursuing in partnership with CSEM, the Swiss Center for Electronics and Microtechnology, to use software-only, cuffless blood pressure monitoring and management in smartphones to scale hypertension management globally.

https://www.innosuisse.ch/inno/en/home/results-and-impact/funding-examples/innovation-projects/biospectal.html

Biospectal Joins CSEM at Swissnex Boston and MIT to Discuss Digital Health Innovation

Biospectal joined a panel hosted by the Swiss Center for Electronics and Microtechnology (CSEM) on February 20th in Cambridge, Massachusetts to dialogue about Swiss and American perspectives on Digital Health Innovation. CSEM opened the evening by sharing their most recent innovations in health related technology, including a focus on health sensors and non-invasive approaches to biosensing. Eliott Jones from Biospectal continued to present their non-invasive optical algorithm technology that they’re developing to enable blood pressure monitoring via the fingertip on a smartphone camera.

“It was a really stimulating evening with a lot of discussion from handling of data – how patients will be able to manage their health information  more effectively with new technologies – as well as empowering end users to participate in the diagnosis and treatment of conditions, ” he observed. “The Cambridge and Boston environment is has such vibrant academic energy, and the audience was a great cross-section of medical, public health, business, engineering and many from other backgrounds in the audience. The questions were challenging and insightful, and most of all dealing with some of the realities surrounding the positives but also the risks of digital health, particularly around data management and security.” For more about the Swissnex event, see: https://www.swissnexboston.org/event/innovation-in-digital-health-swiss-and-us-perspectives/

The next night on Thursday, the CSEM and Biospectal team made their way down Massachusetts Ave. to MIT to present again at Venture Cafe, MIT’s meetup and collaboration space for international pitch night. There, they continued the discussion with another bright and diverse group about virtualizing blood pressure cuff into the smartphone. Notably, there was  a focus on the implications of massively scalable distribution of hypertension monitors through existing smartphones – and what that means for global health. “Again, we are excited to share our vision of making hypertension monitoring and management accessible through devices that people already have in their pocket, even in low income settings,” he explained. “Then that data is made actionable by connecting it to the people and resources to help treat the condition and improve quality of life.”

Biospectal Wins 2018 MassChallenge Gold Prize Among 1000 Competitors

We are honored to have Biospectal’s cuffless optical blood pressure solution recognized by being awarded MassChallenge Switzerland’s 2018 Gold prize from a field of 1000 applicants and many talented cohort participants. A shout out to our technology research partner, CSEM for their brilliance and support.

Professor Patrick Schoettker, co-founder and chief medical advisor of Biospectal, received the award for the team. “We are passionate and driven to bring non-invasive technologies to everyday devices so anybody can monitor their blood pressure, anywhere, anytime. While we are clear on our goal to make a global impact on hypertension monitoring and improving the lives of well over 1.3 billion people worldwide with the disease, we are grateful that others understand where we’re going and believe in our mission. Our thanks to CSEM and MassChallenge for supporting us!” 

Based on over ten years of clinical research and development in Switzerland, Biospectal is currently developing their breakthrough optical blood pressure monitor app and supporting platform to deploy through common smartphones. “All you need is your fingertip and your smartphone loaded with the Biospectal app, we take it from there,” explains Professor Schoettker. “We want the experience to be easy, accessible, and actionable. MassChallenge is helping us on that path.”

Biospectal Selected as One of Ten Finalists for the “Saving Lives at Birth” 2018 Grand Challenge

Biospectal was recently selected from more than five hundred applicants to present with our partner team at the Saving Lives at Birth Global Grand Challenge DEVELOPMENTxCHANGE conference in Washington, D.C. Saving Lives at Birth is focused on identifying and scaling transformative prevention and treatment approaches for pregnant women and newborns. It brings together the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the Government of Norway (Norad), the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Grand Challenges Canada, the U.K. Department of International Development (DFID), and the Korea International Cooperation Agency (KOICA).

The team’s proposal is to support an independent field validation study through One Kenya, Limited, and the World Health Organization to integrate the Biospectal’s smartphone based optical blood pressure solution with World Health Organization’s OpenSRP electronic medical record and longitudinal decision support and patient record system in Tanzania and Indonesia. This will serve as a springboard for wider deployment across sites supporting maternal health in low and low to middle income countries.

”We are thrilled to be able to bring our software technology to a global setting for low resource populations,” said Dr. Patrick Schoettker, co-founder and father of Biospectal’s optical blood pressure vision. “We are intent on democratizing diagnostic sensing for a global population. It’s exciting and core to our mission as co-founders to make a global impact and to enable improvement of the standard of care for all populations. Smartphones are everywhere in the world, and we can piggy back on that technology enable hypertension management with a device people already have in their pocket.”

Biospectal will be joining other current innovators working with Saving Lives at Birth, including the nine other finalists and ten award recipients selected previously in Round 8.

For more information, see: https://savinglivesatbirth.net/blog/18/04/20/save-date-saving-lives-birth-developmentxchange-2018

Contact

  • Biospectal SA
  • Chemin du Calvaire 7
  • 1005 Lausanne, Switzerland

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