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The aMoon fund and Roche Diagnostics have announce the selection of the first two companies for their Starfinder Lab program, in which they cooperate in identifying and cultivating young companies or early-stage projects in digital health. The original aim was to choose three companies, in digital pathology, lung cancer diagnosis, and new antibiotics, but it was decided that there was at present no suitable company in antibiotics. The two companies chosen are in the other two fields.

The company chosen in digital pathology is called Sentient. Its product is interesting and different. Most digital health companies in this field have built AI systems that help pathologists to pay attention more quickly to suspect areas and identify signs of disease that would probably not be identified by human eye only. Sentient, on the basis of pictures gathered from real biopsies, produces synthetic pictures that are similar but not identical to the original ones, and do not actually belong to any particular patient. The aim is to give the AI system a larger pool of pictures on which to train. Obtaining data with which to train AI systems is one of the challenges facing companies developing AI tools.

The company was founded in the Technion by Dr. Yonatan Savir, together with researchers Tanya Wasserman and Nati Daniel.

In lung cancer, the chosen company is Causalis, which uses AI to produce a model of factors affecting lung cancer and thus to predict the best drug treatment for each patient. The company was founded by Shimon Sheiba (VP Data Sciences), Orel Hashmatia (CEO), and Yaron Goldstein (Senior Software Engineer).

Initially, the companies will operate for nine months in a kind of accelerator, until the prototype stage. Each company will receive $250,000 in finance from Roche and aMoon, which will also provide them with access to medical databases and other resources.

Adi Zamir, aMoon-Roche Partnership Leader, says that the partnership is currently in the process of identifying the most interesting fields and mapping the challenges for 2022. “This process brings together managers and experts from the two companies at a very high level of seniority,” she says. “After this process, which takes about three months, we present our questions and the needs we have identified to the Israeli ecosystem (hospitals, health funds, insurance companies, government agencies, and so forth), make sure that they see a need, and, importantly, make sure that it is possible to obtain information that will enable the companies to develop their technologies. If there are no available data, it’s difficult to build a business in digital health. We offer information both from our partners and from Roche itself.

“If the need and the information exist, it’s worth writing a call for proposals in that area. From there, we start to look for the projects or companies that are just starting out but that have everything they need to carry on, from the point of view of the idea and the team. We don’t necessarily require that they should already have a stable business management, because that’s exactly where we can help.”

In the current round, 51 companies reached the submission stage, Zamir says. Of them, thirteen were chosen to present at a “pitch day”. “Each company that didn’t make it to the next stage received a detailed explanation of why it wasn’t suitable. We worked with every company that made it through to the pitch day so that each one would present itself as clearly as possible. After that, the partners reviewed the materials, held an internal discussion, and went back to talk to the companies, mainly those on which there was no agreement. We agreed that in antibiotics no company would be chosen, because there wasn’t an exact match. It’s still a very academic field.”

The intention is to choose nine companies over three years, and so next year four calls for proposals will be published, one of them in place of the one that was not precisely met this year. “The aim is to create companies that have the potential to become global, from day one,” says Zamir.

Zamir is especially proud of the fact that Causalis was formed around the call for proposals. “This is a classic group of entrepreneurs, with a business element and a technological element, that had a model that assists personalization, but that wasn’t certain in which field to apply it, and when the opportunity arose, they decided to apply it to the need that we had defined after examining the market.”

Published by Globes, Israel business news – en.globes.co.il – on September 1, 2021

Israeli healthcare venture capital fund aMoon and pharmaceutical giant Roche have launched a joint program for investment in early stage digital health companies. The project is called the Starfinder Digital Innovation Lab. The companies will mark out each year, for the next three years, three subsectors in the field of digital health and will then seek out startups leading in the area. Ultimately they will select nine companies for the venture.

In the coming year, aMoon and Roche will seek companies in the fields of lung cancer, resistance to antibiotics, and digital pathology. Each startup will receive funding, support and strategic mentoring as well as access to medical data banks with the assistance of Roche as well as access to potential customers.

aMoon cofounder Dr. Yair Schindel said, “Roche is a huge company with major digital activities. They are very innovative in this field and acquire a diverse range of technology from outside. They are deeply acquainted with the needs of companies like them and like their customers as well as doctors and hospitals. They are leading in the world in the field of medical research using computers and recently hired Prof. Aviv Regev, who was previously one of the leading researchers in the field at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. Access like that gives Roche an advantage in preparing itself for the future.

Schindel sees in Starfinder, an opportunity to bring Roche closer to Israel’s innovative medical ecosystem. He said, “When you look at what caused places like Boston and California to grow into the leading biotech areas in the world, then we see that you need the biggest players to be involved and invest in companies. This needs to happen in Israel.”

When asked why Roche is interested in Israel’s ecosystem, Babette Güldenpfennig, Global Head of Licensing, Diagnostic Business Development at Roche said, “Our ambition is to provide all patients with the right treatment at the right time. Roche Diagnostics has come a long way towards materializing this ambition by offering the industries` most comprehensive portfolio of test assays and instruments as the necessary basis for clinical decision making and personalized healthcare. However to further improve and help materialize our ambition to the fullest we need to continually improve our abilities to digitally collect, aggregate and interpret the vast quantity of test results and patient data to provide actionable information and decision support tools to doctors and patients across the continuum of care. We realized that we need to complement our internal efforts by creating synergies with strong innovative partners in the data and AI field to further contribute to precision diagnostics and, in the future, enable integrated diagnostics. The Israeli healthcare community is known for their strong role, knowledge and expertise when it comes to data generation, collection, interpretation, and the development of sophisticated analytics and AI solutions.”

The program is scheduled to run for the next three years, with three companies set to be selected and receive investments each year
Israel-based life sciences venture capital firm aMoon and Swiss biotechnology company Roche have announced a collaborative agreement to launch an early-stage investment program named “StarFinder Digital Innovation Lab.”

The program is scheduled to run for the next three years, with three companies set to be selected and receive investments each year. According to aMoon, the program will provide elected entrepreneurs access to global expertise from Roche and aMoon, access to a network of contacts, several hundreds of thousands of dollars in investment with an option for a follow-up SAFE investment, access to studies and deep data, as well as physical office space within aMoon headquarters in Ra’anana.

“This program will allow us to build exceptional relationships with Israel’s brightest entrepreneurs, as well as take an active and strategic role in building disruptive startups together with Israel’s leading Life Sciences and HealthTech fund,” said Michele Pedrocchi, Head of Global Strategy and Business Development at Roche Diagnostics. “aMoon’s experience and know-how in healthtech investment complements our ability to provide unique market access and expertise to design solutions that are tailored to real market needs in collaboration with our customers globally. This program is a valuable aspect of our digital healthcare footprint and we are excited about the potential of this initiative.”

Swiss pharma & diagnostics company Roche partners with Israeli VC aMoon to bring the next wave of Israeli healthtech innovation to life…

Roche, a Swiss healthcare giant with global reach, teams up with one of the leading Israeli healthcare and life sciences VC firm, aMoon, on a collaborative investment program aimed at accelerating innovative diagnostic technologies from Israel’s healthtech ecosystem. The collaboration, called “StarFinder Lab,” will provide funding, mentoring, and strategic support to “9 Stars,” newly-formed or existing ventures, elected through the program.

The partnership focuses on identifying and cultivating disruptive AI-driven data as well as digital healthcare solutions from early-stage startups providing different technological solutions for the many different moving aspects of healthcare. “Healthtech and AI are transforming the healthcare industry as we know it, and we see great value in working with Israeli healthcare innovators as they build their companies,” said Michele Pedrocchi, Head of Global Strategy and Business Development at Roche Diagnostics.

The joint venture will create an innovative atmosphere, where selected startups will receive access to global expertise from the Roche and aMoon. Through focused guidance startups will be able to tap into the Swiss healthtech company and the partnering VC firm’s vast resources including capital, key-market access, deep data, as well as office space at aMoon’s Israel-based headquarters.

Pedrocchi continues to explain: “This program will allow us to build exceptional relationships with Israel’s brightest entrepreneurs, as well as take an active and strategic role in building disruptive start-ups together with Israel’s leading Life Sciences and HealthTech fund. aMoon’s

experience and know how in healthtech investment complements our ability to provide unique market access and expertise to design solutions that are tailored to real market needs in collaboration with our customers globally. This program is a valuable aspect of our digital healthcare footprint and we are excited about the potential of this initiative.”

“StarFinder’s emphasis is on the best of the best talents who can deliver impactful solutions for defined global challenges in healthcare,” said Avi Danziger, CEO of Roche Israel. “Roche Global is ranked first in the world among healthcare companies with global investments in R&D reaching $12.6 billion in 2019. Roche brings with it unique integration capabilities under “OneRoche” for leading the world’s personalized healthcare, with most effective and safe solutions to the right patients, at the right time at the right value.”