Apple's medical tracking feature

This week, Apple revealed new features for medication tracking, a new atrial fibrillation history and sleep stage tracking. With iOS16 and watchOS9, users can now track their medications, vitamins and supplements directly in the Health app. In the US, users can also receive alerts about possible drug interactions if they upload a new medication that could react poorly with one of their current medications.

Apple's new medication feature brings up a concerning fact that around half of the people prescribed medications for chronic conditions don’t take them as instructed. One 2017 study found that participants delayed taking their medications 80–85% of the time and forget to take them 46% of the time. Not taking medications as prescribed leads to an estimated 125,000 deaths each year.

There are plenty of other medication adherence apps already on the market that give people alerts when they've to take their medications. For iPhone users, this feature would be more accessible than some standalone apps already on the market. However, considering the elderly are intended users for this feature, only 60% of people over 65 in the US are using smartphones. But this data doesn’t reveal whether these 60% are actually owners of an iPhone or an Apple Watch where they would be able to use Apple's new feature.

On Dealroom.co, you can view 95+ medication adherence startups that develop medication management software and smart pill dispensers. This solution is not only useful for the patient journey,  but also for clinical trials process. Discover and explore these medication adherence startups. 👇

In other news

👶 Saudi Arabia plans to spend $1 billion a year discovering treatments to slow aging. The Saudi royal family has started a nonprofit called the Hevolution Foundation, which plans to spend $1B a year of its oil wealth on research on the biology of aging and finding ways to extend the number of years people live in good health, a concept known as “health span.”. - MIT Technology Review

🤰 Can wearables turn temperature into a pregnancy test? Looking at temperature data from 30 women who became pregnant while wearing an ŌURA ring, researchers at the University of California San Diego, found that nightly maximum temperatures were noticeably higher two to nine days after sex that ultimately led to conception. - STAT

💊  How celebrity investor Mark Cuban is tackling out-of-control drug prices.  MCCPDC works to lower consumer drug costs by bypassing the middlemen and working directly with manufacturers and distributors. - PharmaPhorum

🤔 Recommended reading: Digital health has failed, but that doesn’t mean the future is hopeless. - Fast Company

Latest healthtech and biotech deals

The largest from last week:

🇺🇸 Resilience, a biomanufacturing company dedicated to broadening access to complex medicines, raised $625M in Series D.  

🇫🇷 Owkin, a collaborative research platform that allows doctors, medical researchers, and pharmaceutical companies to identify new drug candidates, and enhance clinical trials, raised $80M in Series B. Owkin will use the investment to support its data generation strategy in multiple therapeutic areas with a strong focus on multimodal and rich biological data. 

🇭🇰 InSilico Medicine, developer of an AI platform for drug development to treat cancer and age-related diseases, raised $60M in Series D at a $1.1B valuation.

Other notable deals from around the globe:

🇺🇸 Bicycle Health, a virtual provider of treatment for opioid use disorder (OUD), raised $50M in Series B to drive accelerated growth in virtual opioid addiction treatment.

🇺🇸 Nava, provider of employee benefits brokerage services with a focus on affordable healthcare, raised $40M in Series B.

🇫🇷 Moon Surgical, a Paris-based robotic surgery system startup, raised $31M in Series A.

Read up on all the latest health deals in Dealroom.co

Tip of the week

🚀 Dealroom 2022 edition of the EMEA VC Prominence Rank is now live. Here you can find the top EMEA VCs most active health investors. 👈

Based on Dealroom data, this list is a practical tool for startups and LPs to assess what leading VCs have been up to, and visa-versa, and for VCs to reflect on how they’ve been supporting startups in the past 12 months.

Job opportunities

10.6K+ open roles in European healthtech companies, such as Teckro, Min Doktor, Natural Cycles, Oxford Nanopore Technologies, and more.

🇳🇱 At Dealroom.co, we are hiring for 12 positions including Account Excutive, Data Science Intern, and more.

Discover 112K jobs openings at healthtech and biotech startups. (login for full results)

Dive in

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🦄 New Healthtech and Biotech unicorns announced in 2021 and 2022YTD alone.

Knowledge partners

Laura Rodriguez

Healthtech Specialist
Dealroom.co

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