Company Category: Associations

Utah Health Entrepreneurs (UHE) is a nonprofit organization with a mission to remove the current scientific and technological limitations that stymie progress towards the creation of an improved, affordable and accessible healthcare sector. The high cost of healthcare in the USA stems from multiple interconnected factors, with no single definitive root cause. However, one soaring root cause is the extremely high costs to discover and implement medical innovations that can have massive cost benefits for the delivery of good health and burst through many chronic disease financial sink holes. An example of how scientific limitations have stymied progress (and financial savings) is found in the widespread adoption of antibiotic therapy for H. pylori-related ulcers which has saved billions of dollars in healthcare costs by avoiding more expensive surgical procedures with a simple pill. The management of peptic ulcers remained archaic well into the 20th century. Fundamental progress occurred in a very short period (1979–1996) and was due to paradigm shifts from the recognition of the role of H. pylori. This is an example where innovation was avoided/delayed because of the past “way of doing things” and the scientific limitations in place for innovation/research that exist to this day https://www.discovermagazine.com/health/the-doctor-who-drank-infectious-broth-gave-himself-an-ulcer-and-solved-a-medical-mystery) The UHE team is causing the innovation momentum for sequential replications of such significant breakthroughs and concomitantly fulfilling its mission statement by significantly reducing research/healthcare costs on a permanent basis. UHE has removed limitations on scientific progress by providing programs for biotech startups to better survive through the commercialization process. In years past it involved developing curricula for Biotech CEO certification programs at colleges, pitch competitions, networking and regulatory educational sessions. The key data points were to help startups get to “NO” on their projects early and cheaply. Currently only approximately ten percent (10%) of the research provided by academic institutions (paid for by the taxpayers at $54.68 billion dollars per year) is being launched towards commercialization. Shockingly, even 95% of those startups that launch out of that 10% fail for lack of funding, knowledge resources and business expertise. Failure, however, is not “recognized” until investors lose on average $5,000,000.00 for each startup. That is an expensive path to get to “NO”. Currently, there is an estimated $30 billion dollars “trapped” in so called “Zombie” or “Fallen Angel” IPO’s that will be harvested by using UHE solutions to make decisions on the initial failed hypothesis of those entities. This should, in an efficient financial pathway, return approximately 65% of those funds to the original investors who will make that capital available for next generation biotech innovators. UHE has learned that to exponentially reduce this “failure to launch” a management approach to shift the paradigm technological development involves presentation of modern data/technology approaches to rapidly prove or disprove the startup’s hypothesis. Surprisingly, the current methodologies rely on 1939 state-of-the-art legislation designed to provide safe health innovations. It is important to understand that as impressive as they are academic scientists often operate in silos of information and simply are unaware of current technological approaches and resources that can cut through many barriers of regulatory and financial de-risking. UHE provides an umbrella of current knowledge that is offered to startups that can reduce the total cost of innovation. The pace of technological development is so fast that it’s challenging for scientists to stay updated on all available tools and techniques. Without such “umbrella assets” the current state of the art is by default designed to stymie progress. New technologies and methodologies for testing proof of concept data/ hypotheses are constantly being developed, making it difficult for any single scientist to be aware of all possibilities. UHE makes access available to advanced imaging and sensing technologies for startups, so they can adopt new imaging techniques and sensors to capture detailed data that was previously unattainable. UHE is increasingly teaching the use of AI and ML algorithms to analyze large datasets, identify patterns, and generate new insights for startups including funding for sophisticated database access. The successful milestones achieved by UHE are catalyzing the paradigm shift needed to provide disease-agnostic research programs with operational cost efficiencies rather than 1939 based models and will have translational real-world change results. UHE innovation set is best described by its outcome effect which is measured by a paradigm shift from current status in the startup biotechnology community. Currently, of the 4000 colleges in the USA about 2,400 new bio startups are launched annually. The average “cost to fail” exceeds $5,000,000 each and at a minimum 90% of startups fail annually. That business model needs UHE innovation! UHE assisted startups are providing greater ROIs for their investors and reducing the time to commercialization. Securing biotech investments is challenging for a biotech start-up. Biotech investors want to see strong, promising data before investing. Securing this essential investment is a catch-22 for biotech start-ups and scale-ups. Simply put, the solution to the problem becomes the problem itself, generate data to secure funding while you need funding to generate data! The National Science Foundation (NSF) established the Directorate for Technology, Innovation and Partnerships (TIP) in March 2022. This is NSF’s first new directorate in more than 30 years. The TIP directorate focuses on supporting use-inspired research and development, aiming to accelerate the translation of research results into practical applications across all directorates. UHE has made available its training and recruiting resources to their network of eight research directorates. This allows for maximum national outreach for new deal flow on a national rather than regional basis. UHE is distributing information and funding for technologies such as artificial intelligence, biotechnology, cybersecurity, microelectronics, and quantum computing to the largest national biotechnology audience available to it. Put simply our innovative approach of focusing exclusively on current technology availability to either help fail startups quick and cheap or provide significant derisking data to attract investors has never been done before, just as the adoption of antibiotic therapy for gastric bleeds was never done before until out of the “medical silo thinking” was promoted to the research community. The impact of changing the 1939 “classic” model of obtaining an average $5,000.000 to do animal testing and other 1939 approaches to modern low cost “know your molecule” type programs using machine learning, toxicology and various metabolomic techniques to reduce those expenditures to less than $100,000 will be something that all future researchers will come to approach as normal operating procedures. We can look at the changes in the costs of startups in other business sectors that have been achieved thru innovation as proof that this impact will occur with the right momentum in biotechnology/healthcare. The medical/research community is notoriously very slow in adapting changes especially as the body of scientific literature grows at exponential rates. A paradigm shift in science occurs through a process of accumulating anomalies, crisis, and eventual replacement of an established framework with a new one. The rising cost of capital, the demographic tidal wave of retirees guarantees a crisis in innovation/healthcare costs and the ultimate impact of UHE activities far beyond current existing capabilities. UHE is driving change helping private biotech investors by de-risking private investment capital in the Biotech and Life Science space. The team welcomes individuals and organizations that wish to collaborate or provide educational materials to the biotech community. Please feel free to contact us with your insights or availability.