In this week’s edition of InnovationRx, we look at efforts to improve prior authorization, commercializing Bell Labs’ IP portfolio, a new billionaire from Caris Life Sciences’ IPO, a big funding round for robots to do cataract surgery, and more. To get it in your inbox, subscribe here.

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On Monday, representatives from multiple health insurance companies said they had pledged to the Department of Health and Human Services that they would improve their prior authorization procedures, the bureaucratic process required for them to pay for certain tests, medications or procedures. The insurers vowed to reduce the number of claims subject to prior authorization, standardize electronic requests for them and offer 90% of approvals in real time by 2027.

This isn’t the first time the industry has pledged to streamline the prior authorization process. Insurers made a similar pledge during the first Trump Administration in 2018, with some of those promises echoing language in the current announcement.

When Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Administrator Mehmet Oz was asked at a press event why he thought this effort could work when others have failed, he replied that “there is violence in the streets over these issues now,” presumably alluding to the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson last December. The technology is better now, too, he said, and the Administration plans to back the efforts with regulation.

“Either you fix it, or we’ll fix it,” Oz told the insurance company execs.

Bell Labs Is Commercializing Its Historic IP Portfolio, Starting With Healthcare

Nokia

For decades, Bell Labs’ research was legendary–an innovation factory that spawned transistors, lasers and solar cells. But its researchers were always better at ideas than commercialization. Even today, lots of patents and research ideas remain tucked away in its suburban New Jersey offices.

Since joining Nokia in 2021, chief strategy and technology officer Nishant Batra has been working to change that. He told Forbes that when he kicked off the commercialization effort, he thought he could spin out two or three companies a year, but now thinks he may be able to do three to five. “The world wouldn’t exist without Bell Labs, but what Bell Labs does not do well is monetization,” Batra told Forbes.

A big part of the effort to change that comes with a partnership with deep tech investor Celesta, which has $1.1 billion in assets under management and with whom Nokia has co-invested in the past. The two are scouring Bell Labs’ IP portfolio for pieces of technology that might have commercial applications – and the first spinout is in healthcare.

That first company, called Astranu, spun out in May with a small amount of seed funding, to apply Bell Labs’ imaging technology known as integrated optical coherence tomography to diagnostics of middle ear conditions. It ultimately hopes to transform ear diagnostic care with advanced, non-invasive, high-resolution 3D imaging by reducing the need for exploratory surgery and expensive MRIs

“We built this technology for optical use, for communications,” Batra said. But as Bell Labs’ researchers and Celesta’s investors analyzed the technology, they realized what was built for communications could be applied to creating an accurate, handheld test for the middle ear. “Our researchers on optical said, ‘this is a good application,’ and our friends at Celesta said, ‘we can take this to market with you,’” Batra said.

Most of this hidden-away IP won’t be healthcare-related, but it’s intriguing that the first company to launch from the Bell Labs’ portfolio is, which not only shows the breadth of its research applications, but also how many technology innovations can be adapted to help patients.

“We call it ‘bioconvergence,’” said Celesta’s founding managing partner Sriram Viswanathan, noting how miniaturization of technology could be extremely helpful for medical applications. “It’s the intersection of advanced AI and semiconductor-related technologies as it applies to life sciences and biotech. Think about it as diagnostics more than therapeutics….There are so many applications in the healthcare area that we see this as a natural.”

BIOTECH AND PHARMA

Drugmaker Novo Nordisk said on Monday that it was ending its arrangement to sell its weight-loss drug, Wegovy, through telehealth provider Hims & Hers. The pharmaceutical company accused Hims & Hers of using “deceptive marketing” to sell knockoff versions of its drug in a statement. The stock price of Hims & Hers collapsed shortly after the announcement, cutting its market capitalization by nearly one-third to a recent $9.6 billion, pummeling the fortune of cofounder and CEO Andrew Dudum , who is no longer a billionaire.

Plus : A study published in the Journal of Immunology identified a biomarker that helps predict whether colorectal patients will respond to treatment using cytokine-induced killer cells.

DIGITAL HEALTH AND AI

Last week, precision medicine company Caris Life Sciences went public, minting a new billionaire in founder David Dean Halbert. At the company’s recent market cap of $7.4 billion, Halbert is worth at least $3.3 billion by Forbes calculations. He owns nearly 44% of the company. “I fundamentally believed that if there was something wrong with the human body, there was something misfiring at the molecular level and technology advances could find that and diagnose it and possibly treat it,” Halbert told Forbes. Read more here.

Plus : Medical scribing startup Abridge reached a valuation of $5.3 billion after raising $300 million in venture funding led by Andreessen Horowitz. The Pittsburgh-based company has surged as doctors and health systems have adopted ambient listening apps, and the new valuation is nearly double the $2.75 billion it was worth when it last raised funds in February. Cofounder and CEO Shiv Rao told Forbes that he “wasn’t surprised per se” by the new valuation because of how quickly AI is changing the way companies operate. Abridge is expanding from using ambient listening to improve the doctor-patient relationship to using the technology to help health systems with their billing and coding. “Why we have raised capital and invested so heavily in R&D is that we are taking our models to revenue school and risk-adjustment school,” he said.

MEDTECH

Cataract surgery is one of the world’s most common medical procedures, with more than 4 million of them done each year in the United States alone, but there simply aren’t enough doctors available to meet the demand for everyone who needs the surgery. Enter robotics. An Israeli startup is betting that robots can ultimately do it better and cheaper than human doctors. ForSight Robotics on Tuesday said it had raised $125 million led by Eclipse Ventures to expand its robotic platform, called Oryom, which it says is the world’s first for cataracts and other eye diseases. The funding represents one of the largest investments in a surgical robotics startup, and brings ForSight’s total investment to $195 million.

“At first people were intimidated by robotics’ advancement,” Dr. Joseph Nathan, ForSight’s cofounder, president and chief medical officer, told Forbes. “Now they are seeing robotics as the things that will get them the best outcomes.”

Read more here.

PUBLIC HEALTH AND HOSPITALS

The CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), which makes recommendations for vaccine practices, is scheduled to meet today and tomorrow to discuss vaccines for COVID-19, flu and RSV. Senator Bill Cassidy, R-La., a physician who chairs the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, called for the panel to be delayed, citing the lack of expertise among the new appointees of HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the fact that it includes fewer members than is typical.

RFK Jr. purged the vaccine advisory committee earlier this month.Several of the committee’s new members have expressed skepticism about vaccines, in keeping with his own views. But a new poll from the Harvard Opinion Research Program found these attitudes to be out-of-step with the vast majority of Americans. The survey found that 79% of Americans believe that parents should be required to vaccinate their children in order to attend school, and that even among Republicans 66% held this view. Among the remainder who didn’t support mandatory vaccinations, 60% believed vaccines to be safe and effective–they just prefer to leave the choice up to parents.

Plus : The American Cancer Society released the latest version of its Cancer Atlas today, which found that “an estimated 50% of all cancer deaths worldwide are attributed to modifiable risk factors” and urged public health officials to accordingly focus on prevention.

WHAT WE’RE READING

People with severe diabetes were cured in a small trial of a new stem cell-based infusion from Vertex Pharmaceuticals.

The GOP is pushing Medicaid work requirements even though similar efforts in Georgia and Arkansas have fallen flat.

Changes at federal health agencies leave experts concerned that the U.S. is in worse shape to handle a new pandemic than it was before 2020.

Researchers say that their studies were misrepresented by Health and Human Services to unjustifiably support anti-vaccine conclusions in a memo to Congress.

Arine, which has developed an AI-powered platform for medication management, raised $30 million in venture funding led by Town Hall Ventures.

A new flu drug could be better than a vaccine. In a small phase 2 study, a drug developed by Cidara Therapeutics offered 76.1% protection against catching the flu versus a placebo, higher protection than many flu vaccines.

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