FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
A healthier future at our fingertips thanks to a private-government collaboration
Teaming government lab & start-up to develop the next generation health tracker
By the time you finish reading this sentence, another American will be diagnosed with diabetes. One in ten have it. Even more of us are pre-diabetic, but because the condition is symptomless, it is easy to miss until too late. Testing at a doctor’s office or clinic is the way find out, but it is slow, painful and expensive. Thanks to a collaboration between start-up ViBo Health and Los Alamos National Laboratory, we may soon have a better way: they are developing the DigiScan, which is an instant, pain-free way to detect pre-diabetes and diabetes risks. The plan is to make DigiScan available for free at your pharmacist, gym community center or place of work.
Imagine all the power of a sophisticated blood test, without the needles, without the costs, and being able to repeat the tests continuously to look for changes over time. ViBo Health, a start-up based in the USA and Portugal, is making a scanner that tracks your health and wellness, quickly painlessly and for free. By tracking “metabolites,” a health dashboard shows various wellness indicators over time. The company is now going to benefit from the deep knowledge and capabilities of Los Alamos National Lab (LANL). The same team at LANL previously commercialized a neurotoxin screening tool that won the prestigious Top 100 R&D Award.
The start-up company is taking advantage of Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy (MRS), the technology that allows MRI machines to create images of our bodies, to measure our biochemistry without requiring any blood to be drawn. Dr. Gil Travish (Founder and CEO of ViBo Health) spoke about the importance of collaboration and the benefits of working with LANL: “This has the makings of a great partnership. As a small company we can be innovative, agile and responsive. As a massive national lab with tremendous scientific depth and technical know-how, LANL can marshal resources and capabilities crucial to turning ideas into reality. We are honored to be working with the lab and the fantastic team there. We are also keenly aware that New Mexico, the home state of LANL, has a real challenge with diabetes. We want to help fight this debilitating disease by finding people before they get sick and open up access to this kind of healthcare.”
About ViBo Health: Formed in 2020 the company is on a mission is to transform how we track our health, increase awareness of our health states, and provide useful information so everyone can lead healthier and more fulfilling lives. Based in Los Angeles and Coimbra (Portugal) , ViBo Health (https://www.vibo.health) is working to make predictive, personalized and precision healthcare a reality. We are creating a world where everyone can track their health status using a quick and painless wrist scan.
About LANL: Our mission is to solve national security challenges through simultaneous excellence. We achieve maximum impact on strategic national security priorities by integrating research and development solutions with operational excellence and community engagement. As a federally funded research and development center, Los Alamos National Laboratory aligns our strategic plan with priorities set by the Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration (DOE NNSA) and key national strategy guidance documents. We execute work across all of DOE’s missions: national security, science, energy, and environmental management. Scientific and engineering capabilities developed through LANL’s stockpile research are part of what makes DOE and NNSA a science, technology, and engineering powerhouse for the nation.
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ENDS
FOR MORE INFORMATION PLEASE CONTACT:
Gil Travish
NOTES TO EDITOR:
For more information on ViBo Health see https://www.vibo.health
For more information on LANL see https://discover.lanl.gov/news/media-contacts/
At the SMASH'24 NMR conference, our collaborator Jacob Yoder (Los Alamos National Laboratory) presented a poster on our recent work...
Consumer Health Tracking Using an In ViVo MRS Scanner
Gil Travish1, Geoffrey Gao1, Alexander Hill2, Daliya Aflyatunova2, Carsten Welsch2, Andrew McDowell3, Jacob L.Yoder4
Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy (MRS) is a technique with diverse healthcare applications, such as brain tumor characterization and prostate cancer detection. It is also a promising technology in the field of routine, in vivo quantification of metabolite concentrations. Such data acquired repeatedly over time may be leveraged to infer alterations in various user health states. Our collaboration has been developing the underlying technology that will form the basis of a benchtop health-tracking device and conducting ground-truth metabolomic benchmarking. The commercial aim of this research is the consumer health scanner DigiScan, being produced by ViBo Health. This utilizes MRS to measure key blood and tissue biomarkers akin to a blood test, but non-invasively and without the associated costs and inconveniences. DigiScan is suitable for public spaces like pharmacies, gyms, workplaces, and homes, as well as clinical settings. After insertion of a digit, metabolite spectra are read from multiple locations along a finger. The results are displayed on a health dashboard app, offering an overall health score and metrics for factors like pre-diabetes or diabetes, cholesterol, obesity, fitness and recovery, which are linked to variability in such metabolites as glucose, lactate, lipids, and CRP. Here we describe the project status, including the benchmarking of in vitro MRS experiments, the development of signal processing pipelines, and the use of simulations in developing novel equipment. We shall outline the challenges faced and describe future plans.
ViBo Health, in a collective bittersweet moment, said goodbye to its US home since inception... moving out of UCLA's CNSI Magnify Incubator was inevitable and we were allowed to stay far longer than is typical, but it was a cozy nest. We that everyone at CNSI and Magnify for their support and for making it a home.
We didn't fly too far away...
ViBo Health (USA) is now located at the Terasaki Institute:
ViBo Health
℅ Terasaki Institute for Biomedical Research
11570 W. Olympic Blvd.
Open Office 138
Los Angeles CA 90064
Our CEO Gil Travish was a guest on two podcasts. Both podcasts concern themselves with innovation. The first, a new Portuguese Space Tech focused podcast, is “Dá-me Espaço” (article & podcast). The second podcast is called Talent Empowerment (podcast & video) and hosts many industry leaders and others interested in "talent empowerment".
Los Angeles, California Dec 19, 2022 (Issuewire.com) - ViBo Health, a consumer-oriented medical device company, is excited to announce that we have been selected as one of the six winning startups of the inaugural 2022 Care In Space Challenge. We are also pleased to announce that we have received an equity investment from Boryung Corp, a major Korean pharmaceutical development company, as part of its win.
Biocom California is a trade group promoting the Biotech and related fields in California on policy and other matters. Their "Lifelines" newsletter asked three area leaders for their thoughts on the future...
“We see an acceleration of health monitoring technologies to better inform and guide individuals about their health state. The combination of sensor developments and the trend towards telemedicine will serve to improve patient care and reduce pressures on the primary care health systems.”-Gil Travish, Founder & CEO, ViBo Health
In an article on Dot.LA entitled, "These 2 Los Angeles Startups Are on the Forefront of a New Space Health Care System" by Samson Amore, ViBo Health is featured.
...Right now, Vibo has a growing business terrestrially, but Travish told dot.LA he’s eager to see how the tech could be applied to astronauts. “It is a niche, of course, but it's a growing niche,” Travish said. He noted that Vibo hopes to do in-space testing within the next two years...
Late last year (2022) Mike passed away suddenly and unexpectedly. Our team came to rely on his sound advice, guidance, and good-natured way of cutting to the chase.
ViBo Health is proud to announce that we have been selected for the "Care in Space" challenged.
Gil's citation reads, "For contributions to the development of advanced accelerators, radiation production from charged particle beams, and for translating this research into applications in medical imaging and 3D tomosynthesis x-ray sources." This honor is awarded to no more than 0.5% of the members...
ViBo Health USA has now been accepted into the UCLA Magnify Incubator.
UCLA has been ranked #1 out of 225 universities in creating start-ups.
We have been accepted into the prestigious incubator of the Instituto Pedro Nunes (IPN) in Coimbra, Portugal.
The IPN Incubadora has been recognized as one world's top incubators.
ViBo Health Europe participates in the ESA Business Incubation Centre Portugal.
The European Space Agency (ESA) sponsors the BIC program.
For more information, read our press release about this great application of space technology.
