COVID-19

The team at 50Y has never been more motivated to support companies that can accelerate the pace of science, help increase access to cheap diagnostics, build novel therapeutic and vaccine discovery platforms, and end conventional animal agriculture so we do not have to deal with zoonotic disease outbreaks in the first place.

We’re proud that, to date, founders of sixteen Fifty Years portfolio companies stepped up to fight the global COVID-19 crisis:

1. HelixNano

HelixNano works on novel cancer vaccines. They’ve developed a broad COVID-19 vaccine strategy -- essentially, a plan to make a SARS-CoV-2 vaccine that will work as the virus mutates. They believe they can design multi-antigen vaccines that could be effective against multiple variants of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which will be critically needed in the years to come. It’s an incredibly capable team, the impact could not be clearer, and there are no other announced multi-antigen efforts on a broad SARS-CoV-2 vaccine. 

2. Opentrons

Affordable lab automation company Opentrons has built a high-throughput system for COVID-19 testing that can automate up to 30,000 to 50,000 tests a day with 99% of results received in < 24 hours instead of the industry average of 48-72 hours. They published a very detailed protocol on how to parallelize COVID-19 testing with their robots and the team is working hard to deploy as many of their robots as possible. In the first half of March 2020, they deployed more than 50 robots for COVID-19 testing to labs in the US and Europe, and are eager to deploy in more places as well.
By March 2021, Opentrons launched four COVID-testing hubs to address the backlogs caused by the testing demand from across the country.

3. Nurx

Telemedicine company Nurx launched a COVID-19 end-to-end, direct-to-consumer telehealth consultation & home testing initiative which offers testing for at-risk populations. Given new guidance from the FDA issued on March 22nd, the team at Nurx paused on providing self-collection COVID-19 tests and are waiting on new guidelines.

4. Athelas

The Athelas Home remotely monitors immunocompromised patients’ white blood cell and neutrophil levels using a finger prick blood test in the comfort of their own home. There are about 1 million cancer and chronically immunosuppressed patients in the US who need frequent blood draws as a part of their ongoing therapies and to detect infection risk. With the COVID-19 outbreak, monitoring these immunocompromised patients is quickly becoming a healthcare crisis -- every time such a patient visits a lab for a blood draw, their already weak immune systems are exposed to a potentially fatal infection transmitted from the crowded clinical environment. Clinicians are struggling to continue chemotherapy regimens to fight cancers while balancing the risk of such a patient contracting an infection without blood level monitoring.

The Athelas Home has been clinically validated across hundreds of patients as part of successful clinical trials in partnership with the University of Washington, Stanford University, and USC Keck School of Medicine. The device is already FDA Cleared for point-of-care indications and the Athelas team is now seeking an FDA designation to use the device in home environments so that physicians can remotely monitor their immunosuppressed patients without putting them at serious risk for virus exposure.

5. BillionToOne

BillionToOne makes prenatal testing safe and affordable for every expecting mother. In response to COVID-19, BillionToOne released their qSanger-COVID-19 assay that has the potential to support one million COVID tests per day at their CLIA certified molecular diagnostic testing laboratory in Menlo Park. Their Sanger sequencing approach has an 100X higher throughput than the current testing standard (qRT-PCR) and bypasses some of the bottlenecks around instrument availability and supply chain constraints of PCR based COVID testing. With federal approval, BillionToOne’s technology would dramatically increase the testing throughput in the USA and, importantly, could be used all around the world in research centers that only have access to older generation Sanger sequencing technology.

6. Solugen

There's a massive shortage of hand sanitizer in the healthcare system. Solugen produces hand sanitizer to WHO/CDC guidelines using their sustainably produced hydrogen peroxide combined with ethanol, glycerin, and xanthan gum, and then shipping in bulk to hospitals and other healthcare facilities in need. This is a purely philanthropic effort initiated by the Solugen team.

7. BraveCare

BraveCare published a panic-free guide on COVID-19, along with an online COVID-19 symptom checker, so families with concerns can get the information they need without unnecessary worry.

8. BioRender

BioRender, online software for standardizing scientific visual communication, is offering free design support for researchers tackling the COVID-19 outbreak to help scientists better collaborate on solutions. This will not only allow scientists to publish their research faster but also help the general public to better understand what’s going on and fight the spread of misinformation.

9. Tierra Biosciences

Tierra Biosciences makes proteins on demand. Tierra has offered to help support scientists working to identify & treat COVID-19. They have a high throughput in vitro protein expression platform that can be used to create many proteins and protein variants quickly (eg. antigens, targets, diagnostic enzymes, computationally designed proteins). This is valuable to scientists needing viral proteins for screening or those that need protein variants to screen their assays.

10. Multiply Labs

Multiply Labs makes manufacturing stack for personalized pharmaceuticals. They’re exploring whether it's possible to use their robots to manufacture personalized therapies containing Remdesivir (Gilead's experimental antiviral) or chloroquine (a generic antiviral that has shown promising results fighting coronavirus). Because these are powerful drugs, it is important to carefully regulate the dosage, especially for frail patients who may otherwise suffer side effects that adversely affect the liver and kidneys. These are exactly the patients most affected by COVID-19 and Multiply Labs may be able to use their robotic manufacturing technology to produce highly accurate dosages that will suit their needs.

11. Avro Life Science

Avro Life Science is building a universal platform for transdermal drug delivery. The team is exploring using their patches to deliver Remdesivir (an antiviral drug that has shown some success in combating COVID-19). Remdesivir is currently only IV administered, which could put potentially uninfected patients or those trying to receive prophylactic therapy at greater risk. Delivering this in a transdermal patch would decrease toxicity and increase safety in large-scale administration.

12. Arpeggio Biosciences

Arpeggio Biosciences, a company that enables faster drug discovery by providing transparency into how drugs work inside of and around cells, is about to release their -omics software portal as a free tool to analyze not only SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19) but also the transcriptomic and genomic datasets of other coronavirus strains.

13. 54Gene (wound down)

54Gene launched an effort to increase Nigeria's COVID-19 testing capacity by 10x. They're contributing both cash and their sequencing and genomics know-how to make this happen.

14. Octant Bio

Octant Bio are experts in mapping functional relationships between chemicals and human biology with a focus on G-protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs). They repurposed a part of their platform to detect SARS-CoV-2. Their “SwabSeq” method is cheap (~1$), sensitive (1-6 molecules), quantitative (3-4 logs), and scalable (10k/day w/o automation). They are releasing this work under the OpenCovidPledge license to make sure the developments can be widely adopted. Details in the CEO’s tweet-storm and a more detailed 'living whitepaper' here.

15. Persephone Biome

Persephone Biome is engineering the microbiome to cure cancer. The company announced that they are working on an immune-boosting microbiome therapeutic to help prevent and fight the novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) as well as a potential stool-based diagnostic designed to help predict which patients are at the highest risk of developing severe complications/mortality from COVID-19.

16. resistanceBio

resistanceBio is finding novel ways to fight against drug-resistant bacteria. Recent studies have demonstrated that COVID-19 patients who develop a secondary bacterial infection have a 96% chance of dying. As the number of COVID-19 patients on ventilators and the strain on the healthcare system increases, so too will increase the number of patients who experience these secondary infections. resistanceBio is addressing this unmet clinical need by applying their novel antibiotic strategy to COVID-19 patients on ventilators and is actively working toward an emergency IND to help patients as quickly as possible.

***

Are you working on a company in the COVID-19 space? Email us at hello AT fiftyyears.com.