Panacea BioMatx, an RTP startup focused on technology to delivery personalized medicine through personalized daily supplement formulations in gel-packs, is getting $250,000 in funding from The Launch Place accelerator.
As part of the deal, Panacea will open an office in Danville, Va. where The Launch Place is headquartered.
Just a year ago, the accelerator invested $250,000 in Raleigh startup SEAL Innovation.
Panacea is based at the First Flight Venture Center in RTP. First Flight and Launch Place are active partners, putting on the annual “Big Launch” challenge. Triangle-based Camras Vision won the most recent competition, taking home a $15,000 first prize.
The cash infusion is the latest for Panacea, which so far has raised $1.8 million from angels and other investors, according to the firm’s vice president Ronda Closner.
In 2014, the North Carolina Biotechnology Center awarded a $75,000 to Panacea “to help the company develop an automated process for manufacturing customized dietary supplements.”
Later that year, Panacea acquired Next Generation Snacks Inc. (NGSI), NGSI is the manufacturer of Smooch Snacks “super-food” products made from natural, GMO, and additive free whole fruit smoothie snacks.Smooch is sold on Amazon.com, Abe’s Market, The Vitamin Shoppe, Sprouts, Kings, Balducci’s, Cibo Express, Wild Nature Markets, Fairway Markets, Clark’s Nutrition, and other trade and distribution channels, according to Panacea.
From Panacea:
- The Founders’ Mission:
The founders’ backgrounds in nutrition,gerontology and robotics inspired a passion to help people find and use nutritional supplements that are useful for YOU, not just anyone.
- The Problem:
Over 60% of the US population pops at least one vitamin supplement a day. Almost 30 million Americans consume more than 5 supplements per day. The challenges to these individuals are many.
Unfortunately, the “more is better” philosophy with supplements can land you in the hospital. Taking too much of a supplement can cause negative reactions. Standard pre-packaged supplements may also contain one or more ingredients that poorly interact with other supplements or medications the individual may be taking. Beyond that, swallowing multitudes of pills and trying to remember when and if you have taken all of them is no simple feat. This is even more challenging for the aging population who often struggle with swallowing difficulties, making the need for a better way of delivering the right supplements in a convenient manner even more important.
- The Solution:
The Panacea Solution replaces the need for a person to take multiple pills daily and removes the confusion and hype around nutritional supplements. The Panacea process queries individuals about their current health status; matches this information with a professional peer-reviewed scientific database (used by doctors at Harvard, Mayo Clinic and others) and combines the best formula for the individual into a single good tasting gel-pack.
Panacea focuses on “precision medicine” in which treatment is targeted not only to an individual’s health and genetics but also individual lifestyle and the local environment. The company has developed a combination of robotic and software technology to formulate personalized daily supplement formulations that include food.
“Panacea combines peer-reviewed scientific research, with easy to navigate online surveys and a patent pending robotic platform to create truly personalized dietary supplement formulations in a single easy to swallow pouch,” said The Launch Place CEO Eva Doss in the funding announcement.
“This solution uses great tasting whole foods versus a handfuls of pills to tailor nutritional supplements for each body. We are thrilled to help recruit an advanced flexible manufacturer to the region.”
Panacea co-founder and CEO Edison Hudson launched the company in 2013 along with co-founder L. Staton Noel III.
“People are very different genetically and metabolically so there is a clear case for personalization based on profile data and medical condition,” Hudson explained. “Panacea has created a platform that allows integration of personal data with cost effective use of robotics to produce truly customized healthcare solutions.”
The Launch Place offers consulting, mentoring, training and office support as well as residential and office subsidies. It also is linked to two seed investment funds.
