If you’ve been to any New Tech events you know that our neighborhood block party atmosphere is about fun, friends, B2B connections and celebrating cool tech created in the PNW. On Tuesday night we had executives, entrepreneurs, investors and enthusiasts in the biotech space assembled at Seattle’s Impact Hub to connect and explore the innovative ideas presented by the event’s passionate speakers.
In case you missed it check out the livestream on our Facebook Group. Here are some highlights from the event:
- Beta Hatch
Founder & CEO Virginia Emery kicked off the night with her cleaner, more sustainable vision for the future of agriculture. Virginia inspired the New Tech community to engage with her company’s mission to industrialize insect production for farming. She expressed the need for a paradigm shift in agriculture in addition to the cultivation of new solutions for how we produce food that will sustain our rapidly growing population; a pursuit she emphasized as 20% farming more and 80% farming more efficiently.- Virginia’s fun fact of the night: Insects can eat inorganic waste. Even plastic. One example, the only known way to biodegrade Styrofoam is in the gut of a mealworm. These creatures make goats look like finicky eaters; they eat almost anything. Funner fact, you can bake or fry mealworms for a healthy snack. Beta Hatch has a secret mealworm farm churning out more or these amazing creatures faster than Seattle’s 1,000 person a week migration of new comers is growing.
- Pillsy
- Chuks Onwuneme, Co-Founder and CTO of Pillsy introduced New Tech to a smart pill bottle to support healthy medication and vitamin consumption habits. Chuks related Pillsy’s modus operandi to the 3 Rs of Habit Formation coined by behavioral psychologist, James Clear: Reminder, Routine, Reward. Once Pillsy is paired with a compatible mobile device and the user inputs their prescription specifications within its proprietary app, Pillsy will trigger an alarm to notify the user when it’s time to take their medication. According to the company’s methodology, utilizing Pillsy on a regular basis will promote medication adherence along with its inherent health benefits.
- JumpStartCSR
- Co-Founder & Chief Science Officer George Gosieski and Chief Design Officer Anatolia Au tag teamed a brief presentation of JumpStartCSR, a biotech startup focused on improvement of the human condition by helping people regain, improve, and optimize their musculoskeletal performance. JumpStartCSR is pioneering the “IoT of personalized ergonomic products,” beginning with intelligent footbeds. The proprietary sensor system within the personalized footbeds tracks users’ biomechanical health and relay image-grade medical data to the product’s accompanying app, Holmz. JumpStartCSR currently has a working prototype of an intelligent footbed and is in the process of developing the cognitive expert system for the Holmz app.
- Adaptive Biotech
- The final speaker of the night was Tina Bose, scientific liaison at Adaptive Biotechnologies. The three founding researchers of the company discovered a unique way to profile a patient’s adaptive immune system by sequencing their T-Cell and B-Cell receptors.
- Adaptive Technologies can take an individual’s genetic code and use a combination of bioinformatics and high-throughput sequencing to track B-Cell and T-Cell receptors. The company aims to use immunosequencing data as a biomarker to help diagnose illness and change the course of medicine by improving patient care.
