BIOS Health announced today it is partnering with the City of Bakersfield, Kern County, and Kern Venture Group (KVG) to establish a state-of-the-art precision medicine center in Bakersfield, California. BIOS Health is pioneering the technology to read and interpret neural signals in real-time with AI, giving crucial insights previously inaccessible to clinicians, and pharmaceutical and medical device companies.
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Back Row (left to right): Jim Damian – Kern County’s Chief Economic Development Officer; James Zervis – Kern County’s Chief Administrator Officer; John-Paul (JP) Lake – Kern Venture Group Managing Partner and Co-Founder. Front Row (left to right): Jenni Byers – Interim Director of Bakersfield City Economic & Community Development; David Higdon – Kern Venture Group Managing Partner and Co-Founder; Emil Hewage – BIOS CEO and Cofounder; Christian Clegg – Bakersfield City Manager; Kelly Youngstrom – Kern Venture Group Director of Operations (Photo: Business Wire)
A major challenge in the healthcare industry today is a lack of any clear data and usable insights around the nervous system’s response to novel medicines and medical devices. This leads to high failure rates in clinical trials, costing the industry billions a year, and prevents potentially life-saving treatments from reaching patients – both of which the center aims to address.
BIOS has developed adaptive dosing technology, using neural biomarkers and AI, to observe and adjust in real-time, the effects of drugs and stimulations on patients’ nervous systems. For example, during implantation of neural stimulation devices, clinicians and their patients can now access real-time measurements of the effectiveness of their treatment, optimizing the dosing in under 10 minutes compared to what normally takes 12 months or more of trial and error.
BIOS will establish its West Coast hub to serve as the premier center for neural clinical trials and R&D, and to accelerate its broader commercialization in the US market. By setting up a center dedicated to real-time neural research for clinical trials, BIOS aims not only to scale up operations and reach more patients faster, but to also create an ecosystem of clinicians, pharmaceutical and medical device companies, and clinical trial partners around this new capability in accessing and understanding neural data. It will also enable BIOS to partner with leaders in clinics, more rapidly commercialize its technology in the clinical environment, and better serve pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and healthcare partners in the United States.
BIOS chose Bakersfield for its proximity to large customers, access to talent, efficient operational costs, and its existing network of innovation and medical research. In particular, KVG, a partner and existing investor in BIOS, is attracting leading deep tech companies to the area to establish the industries of the future, and has extensive experience in accelerating their growth there. KVG, Kern County, and the City will also bring together their existing networks of local research organizations and large healthcare systems to facilitate the work of the center.
Emil Hewage, CEO of BIOS Health, said: “We are excited to be creating the infrastructure, alongside our regional, clinical and commercial partners, to deliver a new future for precision medicine development. This investment is in reaction to the massive and unmet demand for more effective and affordable clinical trials. Our adaptive dosing technology can offer a new type of clinical trial in which we observe and interpret the neural response of patients in real-time. Soon, treatment decisions that used to take months, or even prove to be impossible, will be available to clinicians and patients at their fingertips.”
David Higdon, Co-founder and Managing Partner of Kern Venture Group, said: “BIOS Health is leading us into a new era of precision neural insight, much like how reading DNA transformed medicine, and continues to do so. We see the potential to transform Bakersfield and the Central Valley with BIOS by establishing a critical mass of researchers, trials, and experts in the area. The potential really is unbounded for impact and for growth.”
Jenni Byers, Interim Director, City of Bakersfield’s Economic & Community Development Department: “BIOS’s work is unique and has the potential to transform modern medicine as we know it today. Bakersfield is a prime West Coast location with an abundant labor force, robust job training programs, and has the resources to support BIOS’s growth. We are confident that our support of BIOS will be an important investment in Bakersfield’s and BIOS’s future.”
Jim Damian, Chief Economic Development Officer in Kern County, said: “Kern County is thrilled to partner with the City of Bakersfield and Kern Venture Group to welcome BIOS Health Ltd’s West Coast Hub to Kern County. This new business will not only generate quality jobs within our growing biotech and artificial intelligence sectors, but will support our region’s ambition of being the best place in California to start and grow a business.”
Lord David Prior, former Chair of NHS England and investor in BIOS, said: “There is a huge backlog in clinical trials in part because they do not have the insight needed into how their therapies are affecting patients’ nervous systems or the means to adjust the dosing to reduce side effects. BIOS Health’s technology is a game-changer that will be able to reduce that backlog and accelerate better therapies through to clinical trial success so more patients are able to benefit faster.”
This news comes after BIOS Health announced in 2023 it had secured a growth round of funding from key partners, including KVG. BIOS also continues work as the data insights platform for the largest ever study of the human vagus nerve with the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and partners including the University of Minnesota, the Mayo Clinic, and Stanford University started in Q4 of 2022.
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About BIOS Health
BIOS Health is pioneering the technology to read neural data in real-time with AI to power a new generation of precision medicines. The human nervous system carries vast quantities of data, and BIOS’ ability to precisely link nerve activity to specific conditions through the discovery of their neural biomarkers is a game-changer for precision medicine, giving crucial insights previously inaccessible to clinicians and researchers. Similar to the DNA revolution in medicine, BIOS’ neural insights platform could hold the key to a new generation of treatments for conditions including hypertension, diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, and even diseases of the brain itself such as Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s, and ultimately help millions of patients improve their quality of life.
BIOS was co-founded by Cambridge University researchers Emil Hewage and Oliver Armitage, and its advisors include Oxford University Professors David Paterson and Tim Denison, CEO of Candel Therapeutics Paul Peter Tak, and IQVIA VP of Genomic and Precision Medicine Joanne Hackett (Chair of the BIOS Board).
Read more at bios.health.
About Kern Venture Group
Kern Venture Group (KVG) believes a successful fund is comprised of companies with exceptional founders driven by transformational ideas. Headquartered in the resource-rich Central Valley of California, KVG leverages the strengths of the area to provide capital, a diverse network, and experience to their portfolio companies.
Founded in 2018, KVG is raising capital for their third fund focusing on early-stage to Series B investments. KVG is industry agnostic, driven by the belief that great companies can be found in all industries. The company makes a point to invest in startups that positively impact their community and surrounding areas. KVG recently partnered with the City of Bakersfield and the County of Kern to help portfolio companies relocate to the area to take advantage of strategic economic development programs.
Read more at Kern Venture Group.
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