Drug addiction has often proven resistant to the best efforts for treatment. New York-based startup Medicasafe Inc. hopes to provide another tool in the arsenal to boost opioid use disorder (OUD) treatment. Rather than send a recovering addict home every couple of weeks with an unmonitored and uncontrolled supply of buprenorphine and naloxone, it has developed a drug-device combination product that digitally enables and tracks patient retrieval of these drugs.
TORONTO – On average, radiology specialists diagnose fewer than 50% of cases of collapsed lung or pneumothorax using chest X-rays, said systems design engineer Hamid Tizhoosh. The Insignio system developed at Tizhoosh's Kitchener, Ontario-based Kimia Lab has gone further by identifying 75% of cases of collapsed lungs using artificial intelligence (AI) to search a database of 550,000 patients and compare 30,000 cases of pneumothorax there to X-rays of new patients with unknown conditions.
Preclinical animal and cellular models are notoriously bad at predicting drug candidate toxicity in humans. Animal biology is often fundamentally different on this front than in humans, while cells in the lab can't be counted on routinely to replicate the bodily response.
TORONTO – Developed by Edmonton, Alberta-based Itraumacare Inc., the Itclamp has undergone multiple independent and peer-reviewed studies demonstrating its efficacy controlling blood flow from wounds to the head and neck during military combat in the Middle East. That's been enough for the U.S. Department of Defense's Committee on Tactical Combat Casualty Care to officially recommend its acquisition for use on battlefields.
Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machines typically require a dedicated shielded room, as well as an additional room with electronics for analytics. That makes MRI, with a typical costly system that requires whole body immersion and elaborate facilities, not particularly feasible for many health care settings.
Palo Alto, Calif.-based startup Doc.ai is training its sights on the $9.5 billion global epilepsy market, with the aim of using artificial intelligence to help patients find the best medication to control their seizures. To that end, the company is teaming up with the Stanford University School of Medicine and the Stanford Epilepsy Center on a digital health trial to develop a predictive treatment model that will identify the right treatment at the right time for individuals living with epilepsy.
TORONTO – A total of $1.4 million in capital funding from 12 U.S., Canadian and European angel investors will help Toronto-based Cohesys Inc. complete preclinical animal studies, with an eye toward gaining approval for its nontoxic, adhesive tape for rebuilding facial bones.