Ariel Precision Medicine’s Personalized Treatments of Chronic Disease

As The Robotics Hub’s managing director in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Chris Moehle invests in companies that use robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. Chris Moehle invested in Ariel Precision Medicine, which analyzes genetic data using AI to help physicians identify and treat complex chronic diseases.

Ariel Precision Medicine emphasizes the uniqueness of each patient. Two patients may experience different symptoms but the same condition. A physician runs the risk of misdiagnosing the patient by using symptoms alone to identify certain chronic diseases.

Multiple conditions may display the same symptoms. Narrowing down to the correct disease is more difficult for complex conditions. Other factors impact health, such as a patient’s genetics, family history of disease, and lifestyle. Even if a physician identifies the disease, the traditional medical approach treats the symptoms but not the underlying disease.

The ADVANCE Precision Medicine Platform uses AI to generate personalized reports per patient. They take multiple gene variants into account, including those not easily found or often ignored in widely-used genetic tests. Combined with the patient’s medical history and other unique factors, ADVANCE provides physicians with evidence-based steps to treat a patient’s condition.

Assisting Medicine with Advancing Healthcare Through Robots

As managing director of Coal Hill Ventures and The Robotics Hub, Chris Moehle is involved in the day-to-day work that creates opportunities for entrepreneurs who want to launch their Advanced Robotics, Advanced Manufacturing, or AI start-ups. Chris Moehle’s involvement includes providing funding and nurturing these businesses.

While the field of robotics has been a part of the landscape since the 1980s, researchers and innovators have created a landscape where the robot can assist humans in healthcare. No longer in the realm of science fiction, robots are performing a variety of tasks. For one, robotics in healthcare has automated minor tasks. In addition to taking patient temperatures, robots can administer drugs, draw blood, and check in on patients.

For years, surgical robots have simplified surgery. Surgical robots guarantee precision to make incisions without creating scarring. Minimally invasive surgery using surgical robots is credited with reducing infection rates and improving recovery. Moreover, robots can revolutionize remote care. Already, several AI and robotics companies are collaborating with healthcare organizations to provide patients, who cannot get to clinics or hospitals, access to high-quality emergency care.

Now, as our healthcare system is increasingly strained, implementation of robotics will be essential to maintaining our standard of care. From sterilization to contract tracing and distribution, new use cases will emerge that both improve functionality and make environments safer for human care providers and patients. The Robotics Hub looks forward to doing its part in ushering this better future.

Design Thinking – A Solution for Inclusive Innovation

Tech investor Chris Moehle is the former Associate Director for New Ventures at Carnegie Mellon University’s National Robotics Engineering Center. Currently the managing director of The Robotics Hub in Pittsburgh, Chris Moehle supports entrepreneurs innovating in the robotics space. A large part of this effort grew out of Chris’ learning at Carnegie Mellon, one of the earlier pioneers in an approach called “Design Thinking”

Innovations often face a plethora of challenges, many of them brought forth by humans hesitant to change. According to the Harvard Business Review, for innovations to succeed, they have to provide two things: superior results and lower risks/costs associated with change. For innovators seeking to create efficiency, applying these two tenets is not easy. Fortunately, there are ways to ensure innovations offer superior solutions at minimal cost. This has been a classical hallmark of “design thinking.” With this approach, innovators follow an structured, more deliberate path to inventing, without over narrowing scope. It incorporates many of the traditional early start up processes of customer discovery, idea generation, and testing.

For customer discovery, innovators immerse themselves in their customers’ lives, walking in their shoes to identify obvious and hidden needs. Then, they make sense of the data gathered by prioritizing the most important data points. Finally comes alignment, where the team asks,” What job should the new invention do well?” This sets the stage for idea generation. At that point, carefully chosen participants brainstorm on potential solutions and then challenge the implicit assumptions of each in order to weed out impractical ones. Once a final set of possible solutions is arrived at, they can be tested on users, with emerging winners undergoing continuous refinement.

Historically design thinking has been most associated with product design. However, a large part of The Robotics Hub’s methodologies and portfolio management approach is based of off applying design thinking to company building. This allows the approach to tackle a much broader subset of a startup’s early tasks than just discovery, generation, and testing. After five years in business, it seems that this unique and proprietary approach is well suited to maximizing the dual economic and social impact of the firm’s time and portfolio.

Three Robotic Game Changers in the Medical Field

A PhD graduate of the University of Virginia, Chris Moehle is the managing director of The Robotics Hub, a venture capital funding platform for projects and startups in robotics. Chris Moehle oversees a team of eight investors and has been involved in more than a dozen capital investments to date.

Robotics is becoming one of the most significant disruptors in many industries, and the medical field is no exception. Here are three examples of how robots are changing medicine:

– The DaVinci “robot” is one of the best known in the field and has been around for almost 20 years. The robotic surgical device places control of minute tools into a surgeon’s hands. The machine is already used in a variety of minimally invasive procedures. Advances in networking technology may see it used for remote surgery in the future.

– Limbs with robotic components and prosthetic joints are pushing prosthetics from replacements for lost body parts to physical enhancements.

– Exoskeletons aid in walking and mobility. Prototypes have already returned mobility to some disabled patients. Exoskeletons eventually may become the standard for this type of intervention.