Across the Kidneyverse: November 26, 2023
This week: Vivodyne, Symplicity, Cricket, ZeitLife, and America's blood pressure woes
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IN THIS ISSUE
Vivodyne raises $38M from Khosla Ventures to transform drug development with organoids and AI.
Medtronic receives FDA approval for its Symplicity Spyral renal denervation system to treat high blood pressure.
Study: two-thirds of patients with CKD do not meet blood pressure goals.
Cricket Health co-founder Arvind Rajan joined Pear Healthcare Playbook to share the team’s founding story and lessons in company building.
ZeitLife receives investment from the National Kidney Foundation’s Innovation Fund to modernize kidney preservation and logistics.
1. Vivodyne raises $38M from Khosla Ventures to transform drug development with organoids and AI.
What does that mean? Imagine being able to produce human-like tissue at every stage of drug development. That means slashing preclinical testing times by reducing the need for animal testing and being able to learn how compounds will interact with human cells at scale before actually testing them in humans.
If successful, that's a very big deal, and that's why Vivodyne currently has R&D partnerships with "at least half" of the top 10 Big Pharma companies, according to CEO Andrei Georgescu, Ph.D.
Andrei says that the company’s platform is part of the bridge between what is the promise of AI and what is the current state of AI for drug discovery. Vivodyne is not selling a platform. Instead, they will generate data in-house in collaboration with a drug discovery company.
EXPLORE FURTHER
This article shares how co-founders Andrei and Dan met at UPenn and the unique combination of interests and skill sets that brought Vivodyne to life.
A study published by the Vivodyne team in Nature last year shows that vascularization of organoids is possible(!!).
Learn more about innovations in organ transplantation.
2. Medtronic receives FDA approval for its renal denervation system to treat high blood pressure.
The Symplicity Spyral system has been over a decade in the making. It’s an innovative, minimally invasive procedure that delivers radiofrequency energy to nerves near the kidneys that can become overactive and contribute to high blood pressure.
Although currently limited for investigational use in Japan, China and Canada, the Symplicity Spyral Renal Denervation System is approved for commercial use in more than 70 countries around the world.
With this latest FDA approval, Symplicity is ready for immediate commercialization in the US, where nearly half of adults have hypertension and 650 million prescriptions for blood pressure meds are filled each year.1
EXPLORE FURTHER
This 2022 Lancet paper shared findings from the SPYRAL controlled trial in 25 study sites across 7 countries.
This is the second RDN device approval this month. I wrote about Recor Medical’s Paradise system in a recent Signal here.
Medtronic reported Q2 earnings this week.
3. A new study shows two-thirds of patients with CKD do not meet blood pressure goals.
Given the recent excitement in RDN land (see above), I thought it was worth highlighting a study from ASN that shows the rate of hypertension among patients with kidney disease has increased over the last decade. Recall that 45% of US adults has high blood pressure today.
Dr. Sadaf Akbari and her colleagues at University of Iowa used data from the NHNES and found the number of patients taking three or more blood pressure medications tripled from the 2011-14 period to the 2017-20 period.
EXPLORE FURTHER
Read the original article in Healio
Explore the NHNES
Read a 2022 study in Hypertension that observed a similar trend of decreasing BP control using the NHNES data
4. Cricket Health co-founder Arvind Rajan shared the founding story and lessons in company building.
In August 2022, Cricket Health merged with Interwell and Fresenius Health Partners to form the new Interwell Health. But it wasn't an obvious bet even 6 or 7 years ago. Back in 2014, Arvind and his co-founders first began to learn about the complex challenges and opportunities in the kidney space. Arvind’s conversation with
offers a rare glimpse into the founder journey in the kidney space:“My co-founders and I started by immersing ourselves in every available clinical paper on kidney disease. We even reached out to the authors to glean further insights. We conducted interviews with hundreds of kidney failure patients, both over the phone and in-person at their homes across the West Coast. We wanted to understand the patient’s journey and come up with our own thesis on how to improve their care.”
Arvind recruited experts like Carmen Peralta from UCSF, who dedicated her career to combating kidney disease and eventually became Cricket's Chief Medical Officer. He also sought advice from Glenn Chertow, the head of Nephrology at Stanford. Dr Chertow shared that there was no magic secret to delaying kidney failure, and that the health care system’s focus on dialysis rather than upstream intervention was due to misaligned financial incentives and priorities.
A Multistep Transformation
Education: The company’s first offering was Health Options Patient Education (HOPE), which connects advanced stage CKD patients to content, clinical expertise and a network of healthcare professionals, peers and mentors.
Identification: Cricket developed machine-learning algorithms to identify persons with CKD within hospitals’ electronic health record data, as well as additional knowledge-rich decision-support systems to improve CKD management throughout the patient journey.
Risk: They worked with risk-bearing payers and health systems to identify high-risk patients well before kidney failure and focused on preserving kidney function as long as possible.
Comprehensive Care: Cricket’s treatment plan prioritizes slowing the progression of kidney failure, keeping patients out of the hospital, ensuring prepared transitions, and supporting patients on any ESRD treatment path.
Remote, in-person, and at-home care
Multidisciplinary care team
State-of-the-art technology
24/7 peer & clinical support
Outpatient & home dialysis care
EXPLORE FURTHER
Listen to the full conversation on Pear’s Healthcare Playbook
Read my first Signal on value-based kidney care here.
5. NKF's Innovation Fund invests in ZeitLife to modernize kidney preservation and logistics.
CEO Ron Mills and his team are at the forefront of advancing preservation fluid and machine perfusion technologies. Ron has a long list of experiences and exits in this space, including Northernmost (a ZeitLife company), XN Health, Tevosol (a Bridge to Life company), and Organ Recovery Systems.
This marks the sixth investment out of the NKF Innovation Fund and the third focused on transforming the organ transplantation space. Previous investments include MediGO, 34 Lives, Diatiro, Relavo, and Klinirisk.
If you want a primer on the organ procurement system in the United States, including how organs are managed (or not), money flows, technology use and current policies, read the 2020 Bloom Works report (see below).
EXPLORE FURTHER
Learn more about opportunities in organ transplantation here.
Read the Summary of Findings from the 2020 Bloom Works Report.
Learn more about the NKF’s Innovation Fund here.
WEEKLY TRIVIA
This week I asked “Which kidney-related objective from Healthy People 2030 has already been met or exceeded?” The correct answer: raised CKD awareness rate.
The Healthy People 2030 site contains more information about the 14 kidney-related objectives for this decade. Good news: 4 of these are improving. Bad news: 2 are getting worse (catheter use, dialysis death rate). Learn more here.
Shout out to this week’s Winner’s Circle: Elizabeth, Pamela, Satish, Marianne, Maria Luciana, Jessica, Linda, Dave, Jayesh, Paul, Kara, Guy, Robin, Kim, Yolinda, Todd, Jung, Brandon.🏆
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