CH Innovations
Making An Impactful Difference In The Lives Of Children
CH Innovations is a division of the Charles Hood Foundation that was formed in 2015 to further advance the Hood Foundation’s mission to improve the health and quality of life for children through active investment in early-stage companies that develop and bring to market innovative, high-impact child health solutions.
CH Innovations makes Program-Related Investments
Program-Related Investments (PRIs), are a unique funding mechanism that is distinct from both grant programs and traditional investments. CH Innovations seeks to fill the gap between research and real-world application of pediatric-related tools, treatments, and other interventions to find applicable, impactful, and transformational health solutions.
Our PRI program is open to start-up, for-profit companies seeking seed-stage investors. We support a wide range of evidence-based solutions across indications, including but not limited to: diagnostic tools, medical devices, therapeutics, and healthcare IT. Child health does not need to be the primary focus for a company to qualify for PRI funding; however, any investment made through CH Innovations must be directed toward a current program developing solutions for pediatric patients (birth through late adolescence, as defined by the AAP). In addition to capital, our PRIs also provide access to an invaluable network of leading scientific, investment, and business development professionals.
Together, we can make life-changing improvements in the world around us.
Companies are selected for PRI funding through an internal vetting process. All investments are made in strict accordance with IRS Section 4944 guidelines.
Program Related Investments
(Click names for more information. Contact [email protected] with any questions.)
Aldatu Biosciences
Using our novel platform technology — Pan Degenerate Amplification and Adaptation, or PANDAA™ — Aldatu is able to take an already low-cost and sensitive diagnostic, known as qPCR, and enable it for HIV drug resistance genotyping. For the first time, PANDAA™ HIV genotyping empowers healthcare providers with a solution to properly match HIV patients with effective drugs, thus improving patient outcomes and reducing the per-patient cost of HIV care.
Anida Pharma
Multiple pediatric neuro-sensory diseases with high risk of life-long severe disability or death have no existing effective therapies. To address this unmet need Anida Pharma is developing a pipeline of treatments that utilize the potential of resolution biology toward novel treatment paradigms to prevent and restore neuro-sensory dysfunction. The company’s first target indication is Retinopathy of Prematurity. Follow-on indications include drug-induced hearing loss in chemotherapy treated children and neonatal brain injury.
Argus Cognitive
Early diagnosis, continuous monitoring, and management of childhood conditions is extremely challenging. Argus Cognitive develops automated, scalable medical decision support systems to aid clinical diagnosis and therapy choices using unique combinations of classical AI algorithms, modern deep learning approaches, computer vision, and statistical methods. Argus’ noninvasive, nondisruptive collection and analysis of relevant data, both in clinic and at home, allows for earlier, more effective interventions and monitoring. While Argus’ system has broad potential application across medical practice, the company is initially focused on building their Analytics-as-a-Service (AaaS) platform around two pediatric programs: neurodevelopmental disorders, primarily autism, and pediatric cardiology.
BioROSA Technologies
Today, autism diagnosis is achieved through time-consuming and non-scalable behavioral evaluations. BioROSA seeks to transform diagnosis from behavior to biology and to detect Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) before behavioral onset by developing a rapid proprietary, blood-based, metabolomics and machine learning platform. This will improve patient prognosis, enable earlier intervention, support clinical trials, and reduce healthcare costs through a predictive medicine model of care.
Breegi Scientific
We plan to implement our neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) and bring all the necessary functionality like providing heat and humidity, oxygen and light. It is a multi-purpose, fully contained and enclosed microenvironment, accessible with air-locked sleeves and ports for internal manipulation.
Our neonatal intensive care incubator, NICI, was designed (patent pending) to be the affordable, field-friendly, sterile, disposable, (potentially reusable), compact NICU that ploys with a single action for use.
Deck Therapeutics
Inkspace Imaging
Mesentech
A group of pediatric rare diseases leave growing children at high risk of disuse-related fractures and breaks, via conditions such as Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy and Osteogenesis Imperfecta, also known as brittle bone disease. Existing therapies do not absorb well into bone, requiring high doses which lead to side effects and toxicity to the point where patients typically can not complete their therapy. Mesentech has developed a novel drug conjugate that avoids systemic exposure and side effects by specifically delivering the drug to bone tissues, allowing higher dosing with little to no side effects.
Mother’s Milk Is Best
Mulberry Biotherapeutics
Neopenda
Nicolette, Inc.
Nicolette, Inc. has developed innovative technology to help empower patients and their families as they fight acute health battles. Their first product is NicoBoard, a tablet-based application that translates a stream of numbers pulled from a NICU baby’s electronic medical record into easily understood, simple sentences complemented by visual aids like graphs and charts. Coupled with curated education and research materials, this helps parents better analyze trends and track progress, enhancing decision making and supplementing the detailed conversations they have with their baby’s care team.
Nonivasix
Using patented optoacoustic technology, the experienced team of life science innovators and medical engineers at Noninvasix, Inc. have developed an elegant solution for the safe, accurate, and noninvasive monitoring of fetal welfare during labor and delivery.
Novonate
2023 Update: Novonate, Inc. has been acquired by Laborie Medical Technologies Corp.
Nurture Genomics
Every year, millions of American children face the challenges of undiagnosed genetic conditions. Staggeringly, over 10.8 million children in the United States, aged 0 to 17, live with a genetic condition. Despite the availability of advanced medical technology, only a mere 2% of these conditions are detected early, with approximately 12,000 cases identified through state-run newborn screening programs. These screenings currently fail to cover over 700 treatable genetic conditions, leaving a significant gap as thousands of new treatments emerge in the drug discovery pipeline.
Founded in 2022, Nurture Genomics Inc. bridges the gap between knowledge and impact, providing parents and healthcare providers with meaningful health insights based on cutting-edge genomic science. Led by clinical geneticists, researchers, and genetic counselors, Nurture Genomics puts genomic science into practice. We offer genome sequencing for healthy babies and children, facilitating early diagnosis and timely access to life-changing medical interventions.
Plakous Therapeutics
Necrotizing Enterocolitis (NEC) is the leading cause of death in babies of very low birth weight. Current treatments are inadequate, and new therapies are difficult to introduce to this population. Plakous Therapeutics is developing a novel therapeutic to prevent neonatal diseases and heal diseases of inflammation, starting with NEC.
Prapela
Neonatal abstinence syndrome (NAS) is a high-priority, pediatric health problem tragically impacting newborns and disproportionately poor families. This year alone an estimated 50,000 NAS infants will be treated at a cost of more than $3 billion. Prapela is developing a next gen baby box with technology proven to help drug-exposed infants. The clinically-validated technology, Stochastic Vibro-tactile Stimulation (SVS), has been developed at Harvard’s Wyss Institute in collaboration with physicians and researchers from the University of Massachusetts Medical School, Massachusetts General Hospital, and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. This low-cost, non-pharmacological, non-invasive solution is designed to be used in the hospital and taken home. Although initially focused on NAS, Prapela intends to use its SVS technology to help achieve better respiratory outcomes with premature infants, support newborns with heart defects, and soothe babies with colic and other sleep issues.
Stingray Therapeutics
First generation immune-oncology therapies are in adaptive immunity. They modify T-cells or block adaptive immunity suppressive proteins (called ‘checkpoints’). These therapies have made great strides, but resistance is increasing and many tumors do not respond, including life threatening children’s tumors like medulloblastoma. We are an immune oncology company focused on adding innate immunity into the fight against cancers. This should allow for more durable cures and many more kinds of tumors responding. Our oral medicine stimulates innate immunity, and will likely be used with adaptive immunity modulators – enabling both arms of the immune system together to fight cancer. It is expected to treat many types of cancers – prolonging life for far more patients.
ThinkMD
Every year, an estimated 3.5 million children die for no reason other than the impacts of poverty. These children die from preventable diseases such as pneumonia, dehydration, diarrhea, and systemic infections that could be treated with antibiotics. ThinkMD has developed a smartphone-based medical intelligence platform to allow community health workers to diagnose and treat sick children. This platform also gathers important medical and public health data with each assessment, creating a medical knowledge network that can be shared globally among child health providers and researchers.