AlphaLab Health, a health care and life sciences accelerator program from seed stage investor Innovation Works and the Allegheny Health Network, announced the lineup of its second cohort of startup companies featured in the program. The accelerator finished its first cohort of companies in June 2021.
According to Innovation Works, the latest cohort features companies that offer a range of health care-related products or services, including diagnostics, therapeutics, medical devices, health care IT and packaging solutions. Each company will receive up to $100,000 in preseed investment as part of the six-month program that aims to help the startups navigate "key risk points" often found in the clinical and commercial development of the products these companies make.
"AlphaLab Health wraps entrepreneurs with a network of clinical and business experts who know how to help them succeed in the complex health care system," Megan Shaw, managing director for life sciences at Innovation Works, said in a release. "The program brings together all the strengths of IW and AHN and then adds in mentors, access to customers, clinicians with deep experience and domain knowledge, and other resources that can help these talented founders leapfrog past the challenges they would otherwise face."
These are the companies featured in the 2021-2022 Alpha Lab Health Cohort, which Innovation Works provided their respective descriptions for:
- MindTrace — developing technology that allows neurosurgeons to remove brain tumors and seizure-generating tissue, while ensuring each patient leaves the hospital the same person they were when they arrived, preserving personality and skills.
- Parcel Health — creating innovative and sustainable medication packaging designed to be child-resistant and elderly-friendly, all while improving pharmacy workflows and reducing medication errors.
- Hale Therapeutics — with its consumer-facing device, the startup combined smoking cessation science with an elegant full-stack solution to wean people off of nicotine, and its connected medical vaporizer automatically and gradually reduces nicotine intake over time, helping people achieve their goals of quitting smoking better than current Nicotine Replacement Therapies.
- Telling.ai — provides users a detailed lung performance report by having them simply speak into a smartphone with an ultimate vision of turning every smartphone in the world into a powerful remote respiratory monitoring device through an app and that will improve wellness and prevent unneeded hospitalizations and emergency department visits.
- Naima Health — developing the MyHealthyPregnancy app which uses decision science, machine learning and maternal-fetal health expertise to help pregnant women minimize their risk of adverse outcomes, including preterm birth.
- Spoken — helps people with aphasia or other language disorders speak again by predicting likely words and phrases by using the same machine learning algorithms that power a phone’s autocomplete function and applying them to a bigger data set, giving suggestions that fit the context and improve with time.
