Happy New Year - A fresh start in 2022!
Sensoreal’s Newsletter - 30/12/2021
Happy New Year! The days have been getting shorter, but Sensoreal has just been getting busier!
As a quick TLDR for the skimmers in the audience, here are our main news items and goals in brief:
News:
We’ve officially started Phase 2 of our immune response blood test development, and we have secured non-dilutive funding from Health Canada to advance the commercialization of our product over the next two years.
In addition to our immune system monitoring test for healthcare, we are working on the next iteration of a space blood test as well as a rapid test for food safety.
We graduated from the Canadian Technology Accelerator (CTA) – San Francisco Health and we are starting the C2MP Program with MATTER.
We joined the CLIP incubator at the Montreal General Hospital. We are actively looking to build our network, and would love to connect with clinical collaborators, strategic partners and investors who can help us make our vision a reality!
Goals:
We are aiming to wrap-up our ongoing project with the Canadian Space Agency in early 2022.
We have been working hard to put the finishing touches on our in-house additive manufacturing setup for rapid prototyping. We are installing a multi-gas plasma treatment and cleaning system to decrease turnaround time for prototypes even further.
One important goal we have is to officially introduce a clinician to our advisory board. If you or someone you know may be interested in working with us, please reach out!
After much deliberation, Sensoreal is seriously considering adopting its own Roomba. We are open to suggestions for what to name Polly’s companion :)
In a bit more detail, here’s the latest on what’s been going on at Sensoreal:
We’ve been getting the opportunity to speak to many clinicians and medical professionals in our efforts to better understand our market space and client needs. In our last newsletter, we mentioned that we were targeting a COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease) patient population, so we spoke to as many respiratory and COPD specialists as we could find. What we discovered in the process was that COPD exacerbations are quite a complex medical challenge with many unknowns, creating significant challenges to the development of a test to determine a COPD exacerbation cause. Instead of focusing our development on this particularly complex problem, we’ve focused our use case to instead provide a tool to monitor the patient immune response during acute respiratory infections.
To this end, we will be continuing to work on our immune system monitoring test through a Phase 2 grant with Health Canada. This 2-year project will focus on commercializing our Phase 1 prototype, which measured four immune response biomarkers and used a machine-learning algorithm to determine whether the infection was bacterial or viral in origin. Our commercialization efforts will bring the Technology Readiness Level of this prototype from 4 to 6, ensuring compatibility with an outpatient healthcare setting and culminating in an application for Investigational Testing Authorization from Health Canada to validate our device in its target setting. To this end, we are looking for clinicians to join our board of advisors! Please reach out if you know of a clinician who is interested in the development of new technology that can provide rapid diagnostic results, in any setting, with no external equipment or special training needed.
We are very happy to announce that Andrew Kamholtz and Sobha Pisharody have officially joined our advisory board, and would like to give them an extremely warm welcome. We look forward to working with both of you! Andrew has been mentoring us since the beginning of the summer, after a fruitful working relationship during the R&D phase of our aerospace project. We were introduced to Sobha through the CTA program, of which we are now a proud alumnus. Through the program, we worked with four mentors over eight weeks and prepared the groundwork for our upcoming fundraising round. As part of our continuous business development, we are starting the C2MP program with MATTER in Jan 2022 to further explore market opportunities within the US. We have also recently joined the Clinical Innovation Platform (CLIP) at the Montreal General Hospital, following our participation in the annual McGill Clinical Innovation Competition where we were awarded the MI4 Innovation Prize. Through CLIP, we have access to a co-working space, wet and dry labs, and clinical advisors at the hospital. We are excited about Sensoreal Headquarters #2!
It’s great to have these resources, because we have a lot of exciting work coming up! Our Phase 2 Health Canada project was officially kicked off in December. We are wrapping up our project with the Canadian Space Agency, where we developed our signature blood testing platform for space, but we are planning to continue working on new space applications. To keep up with all the development work, we are installing a multi-gas plasma treatment system so that the design, manufacturing and post-processing of our prototypes can all be done on site. We currently have grant funding in place for the next two years, which we are actively working to complement with investor funds. Despite our busy commercialization schedule, we managed to continue networking and talked to about 70 investors over the past six months. We are currently working on building up our investor relationships, with a goal to start a fundraising round early in 2022.
Since it’s looking like it will be a busy new year, we’re glad to have a new addition on our team - welcome Ora! Ora graduated from McGill University’s bioengineering program and has been working on our microfluidics team. In addition to the spunk and good cheer she brings to the office, she’s also responsible for some more quirky additions, including our new pet Polly the Kettle. We are planning to further expand our team (and appliances) in the coming year, looking to bring on new talent (and possibly a Roomba). We are actively talking to candidates and have two vacant positions for a Chemist/Chemical Engineer and a Microfluidics Engineer.
Thanks for sticking it out this far! As always, feel free to reach out to us at any time with questions or comments. We are always happy to connect with investors, entrepreneurs, and clinicians who are interested in our mission!
Happy holidays and stay cozy!
Sensoreal team
