Startup Breathes Life into Bio IoT

　　Nano Global hopes to enable a kind of Internet of Biological Things. The startup struck a partnership with ARM to design a family of SoCs that can monitor and maybe even scrub pathogens in products that range from smartphones and toys to fans, bandages and medical devices.

　　Nano (Austin, Texas) aims to make the world a kind of living lab for drug and disease research. In the process, it hopes to create a digital marketplace where consumers and researchers buy, sell and share molecular data.

　　As if those plans are not ambitious enough, Nano’s approach will use optics and artificial intelligence at the chip level to identify organisms. It will tap blockchain authentication to secure transactions for its open, global molecular database.

　　Its early days for the startup given first chips will not hit the market for a year. Besides ARM, the company announced partnerships with a handful of universities and suggested many more partners will be needed to enable its broad business model.

　　Funding is also a work-in-progress with an undisclosed amount raised from investor Mark Cuban and others that may include ARM’s parent, Softbank and its Vision Fund. Another round is expected to close before April for the company founded in 2015.

　　For now, the company is keeping most details of its chips, partners and funding under wraps. But it is long on vision.

　　“We want to open up a vast new marketplace of real-life, real-time molecular data — that’s far bigger than the Internet of Things,” said Steve Papermaster, CEO both of Nano and of Powershift Group, a venture investment company that is the startup’s other announced backer.

　　Nano hopes such a marketplace could accelerate research on drugs and medical devices that currently rely on relatively limited, proprietary lab work. “This turns their pockets inside out…We seek to partner with a lot of these companies,” Papermaster said.

　　It’s a big but not entirely novel idea. Project Baseline from Verily Life Sciences LLC aims to map human health data generally.  23andMe is taking a similar approach for DNA, as is uBiome for microbiome data, noted Julien Penders, a former medtech researcher for the Imec institute in Belgium and now a co-founder and chief operating officer of startup Bloomlife.

　　With all such efforts, “it’s important to accurately assess the quality and trustworthiness of the data, capture the context of the measurements and establish clear end-points against which the data can be mined and analyzed,” said Penders, who was not familiar with Nano Global.

　　Nano is now putting together partnerships with OEMs of existing products such as smartphones or wearables that could use its SoCs. Long term it aims to enable new kinds of products such as smart bandages that automatically release drugs if they detect an infection or a water container that could detect malaria cells and emit chemicals to kill them.

　　“The health challenges of our time are not about a Fitbit or Apple Watch, but about computing at a nano/bio level,” said Papermaster, who was a White House tech advisor to President George W. Bush.

　　He imagines a molecular database that could support multiple business models.

　　“In some cases, the data may be free and in others the platform may pay people to access their data,” he said. “Just like the green movement certifies buildings or organic food, people will develop a level of health awareness and want to know about the biological safety and efficacy of products,” he added.

　　At this stage, Nano is only saying its SoCs will embed a range of ARM cores, along with communications, optical and environmental sensors and custom blocks. The first chips will be made in 14nm or smaller geometries and could be ready in early 2019. It could take another year for systems using them to ship.

　　While not sharing specific targets, Papermaster said the chips ultimately aim to be low enough in power they might run off energy harvesters. And they will be cheap.

　　“The data is worth more than the chip itself  — that’s a design paradigm we are driving toward,” he said.

　　The startup employs about 50 people including chip designers as well as experts in microscopy, optics and machine learning. Its chips will probably do inference tasks, seeking biological markers based on models that might be trained in partnership with university or corporate labs.

　　“Our IP is probably mainly in software, but we are talking to partners about components to optimize the hardware,” he said.

　　In a press statement, Rene Haas, president of ARM's IP products group said Nano’s technology “will be an important step forward in the collective pursuit of care that improves lives through the application of technology…that will move us one step closer to solving complex health challenges.