AsMovember - a global annual event to grow moustaches during November to raise awareness of men's health issues - has drawn to a close, we've turned our attention to the startups targeting male health issues.
While last week's newsletter covered femtech, the number of startups tackling men's health issues such as prostate cancer, testicular cancer, and men's suicide, is comparatively low.
Numan is a London-based platform that seeks to change men's tendency to avoid the doctor with discreet kits sent directly to the home to treat erectile dysfunction, premature ejaculation, hair loss, gut and lung health. In Numan’s pitch, it mentioned the way they are “creating a patient-led experience around healthcare, using taboo male health issues as the beachhead”. This is similar to what femtech startups started to do years ago, to break the taboo around women’s health.
“Many men's health issues, like erectile dysfunction and hair loss, can be seen as non-major in medical terms but can have a significant impact on self-esteem, confidence, and mental health”, Sokratis Papafloratos, CEO and founder of Numan. Erectile dysfunction is the main issue in men's sexual health, overall impotence rates have doubled in the past 25 years, with 33% of men under the age of 30 and 40% of men in their 40s-50s experiencing the condition.
😔 Hundreds of AI tools have been built to catch covid. None of them helped. Many of the problems that were uncovered are linked to the poor quality of the data that researchers used to develop their tools. Information about covid patients, including medical scans, was collected and shared in the middle of a global pandemic, often by the doctors struggling to treat those patients. Researchers wanted to help quickly, and these were the only public data sets available. But this meant that many tools were built using mislabeled data or data from unknown sources.
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Latest healthtech and biotech deals
The largest from last week:
🇬🇧 Quell Therapeutics, London-based biopharmaceutical developing engineered T-regulatory (Treg) cell therapies for serious medical conditions driven by the immune system, raised $156M in Series B.
🇺🇸 HotSpot Therapeutics, Boston based biopharmaceutical developing allosteric therapies that target regulatory sites on proteins to treat cancer and autoimmune diseases, raised $100M in Series C.
🇰🇷 Lunit, developing advanced medical image analytics and novel imaging biomarkers, raised $61M, and it’s panning to IPO on the South Korean stock market (KOSDAQ) early next year.
🇬🇧 Ieso Digital Health, AI powered digital cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) delivered by a therapist, raised $53M in Series B.
Other notable deals from around the globe:
🇺🇸 Virtual Incision, pioneer of in vivo mini-robot surgery, raised $46M in Series C.
🇺🇸 Allorion Therapeutics, next-generation precision medicine for oncology and autoimmune disease, raised $40M in Series A.
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