InnovationRx: Hinge May Herald A New Wave Of Digital Health IPOs

Forbes

5 days ago

In this week's edition of InnovationRx, we look at how Hinge Health's successful IPO may be a trendsetter, Indian billionaire Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw's 'biosimilars' business, RFK's changes to Covid vaccine guidance and more. To get it in your inbox, subscribe here.
Lex Annison, COO of Hinge Health, Gabriel Mecklenburg, executive chairman, Daniel Perez, CEO, Bianca Buck, head of investor relations, James Budge, CFO, and Jim Pursley, president, ring a ceremonial bell on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange during the company's IPO.
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Digital physical therapy company Hinge Health had its initial public offering last week, opening at $37.85. It's currently trading over 10% above that price, giving it a market cap of over $3.2 billion (though this is about half of its peak valuation in 2021). The company's product portfolio offers personalized care plans for patients with chronic conditions, as well as software that coordinates these plans with a patient's doctor.
Virtual chronic care company Omada Health also filed to go public earlier this month, and that plus the success of Hinge's IPO may begin a new 'wave of digital health companies seeking a public listing following the COVID-19 pandemic,' Pitchbook analyst Aaron DeGagne wrote in a note last week. He identified several companies, including Spring Health, Zocdoc, Noom and Headspace, that 'will be closely watching Hinge Health's IPO outcome' to decide whether to start the process of going public this year.
Kiran Mazumdar
Guerin Blask for Forbes
Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw's booming drug business started not in a laboratory but in a tin-roofed shed in Bengaluru, the city formerly known as Bangalore and the capital of the southern Indian state of Karnataka. Inside, the 25-year-old was using the knowledge she had learned studying beer brewing in Australia to ferment enzymes for customers like Ocean Spray cranberry juice. Originally she had wanted to be a brewer like her father, but it was 1978 and she couldn't find a job. No one wanted to hire a woman as a brewer.
Distraught and disillusioned, Mazumdar-Shaw put her education to another use: making enzymes for industrial uses. In partnership with an Irish entrepreneur who owned a company called Biocon and was looking to expand to India, she set up shop inside that hot shed. 'I call myself an accidental entrepreneur,' she says.
Today, Biocon, which is publicly traded in India, brings in $1.9 billion by selling dozens of generic drugs and 'biosimilar' medications. The company also does contract research for other companies through its publicly traded subsidiary Syngene. While Forbes Self-Made Women list includes only women from the United States, Mazumdar-Shaw would easily make the top 20 were she American. She is one of the world's wealthiest self-made female entrepreneurs, with a fortune that Forbes estimates to be $3.2 billion.
The biggest part of her empire is a majority-owned private subsidiary called Biocon Biologics, which focuses on biosimilars and represents nearly 55% of the parent company's revenue. Akin to what generics are for chemically synthesized drugs, these cheaper alternatives mimic biologic drugs. As with generics, companies like Mazumdar-Shaw's are allowed to develop biosimilars after a brand-name drug's patents expire.
'These are very complex, expensive drugs, and therefore it's important that companies like ours focus on affordable access,' says Mazumdar-Shaw over tea served by a butler at her Manhattan apartment.
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GSK and Spero Therapeutics announced that their phase 3 clinical trial of tebipenem HBr, an antibiotic geared towards treatment of UTIs, was stopped early after an interim analysis showed significant, positive results in the nearly 1,700 enrolled patients. An independent data monitoring committee recommended the halt, as the study met its primary endpoint of showing the drug was non-inferior to a combination of the antibiotics imipenem and cilastatin. The companies plan to submit the new antibiotic to the FDA for approval in the second half of this year.
Plus: Gilgamesh Pharmaceuticals released positive topline results for its phase 2 clinical study of its drug candidate GM-2505 for the treatment of major depressive disorder, finding both rapid and durable decrease in symptoms for patients in the study.
AI chatbots. Scribing tools. Insurance claims software. Electronic health records. Abhinav Shashank, cofounder and CEO of digital health startup Innovaccer, looks at all the new technology for healthcare providers and hospital systems and sees a big problem. 'Healthcare is the only place where technology came in and everything became more inefficient,' Shashank told Forbes. The problem is that large healthcare systems, which may have dozens of hospitals and thousands of physicians, have lots of data and a variety of tools to manage it, but no easy way to put them together. Last week, Innovaccer unveiled its solution to that problem: A new software platform called Gravity that's designed to be a one-stop shop for all those disparate tools and vast amounts of data. Read more here.
Plus: Ambience Healthcare claims that a new study finds that its AI models reduce medical coding errors by over 25% compared to physicians.
HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. announced that the CDC would be dropping its recommendations for pregnant women and healthy children to receive Covid vaccines. This appears to be at odds with the FDA, which listed pregnancy as a reason for vaccination of people under 65 in its new guidance last week. Paul Offit, a vaccine expert at Children's Hospital of Pennsylvania, told Forbes that 'All this does is put children in harm's way and put pregnant women in harm's way.'
RFK Jr. names familiar culprits for the 'sickest generation' in the first MAHA commission report on children's health.
Some struggling biotechs are being dragged down by pricey leases, especially in industry hubs like Boston, San Francisco and San Diego.
Eli Lilly is buying California-based SiteOne Therapeutics, which is developing a non-opioid pain drug, in a deal worth up to $1 billion.
Neuralink, the Elon Musk-founded company developing brain-computer interfaces, has raised $600 million in a venture capital round valuing the company at $9 billion.
Measles infections appear to be slowing down in Texas but they're ticking up in other states, including Iowa, which saw its first infection since 2019.
Conservative groups are lobbying the Trump Administration for stricter guardrails around in vitro fertilization.