There’s nothing like hitting the ground running at the start of the year.
For UPMC Enterprises, that has meant a flurry of investment announcements in the first month of 2025.
We have made new investments in three exciting companies that are working to improve health care — a remote patient monitoring and AI startup, a clinical daycare for medically complex children, and a biotech targeting immune-mediated diseases.
Keep reading to find out more about the latest additions to our portfolio, which were highlighted in the Pittsburgh Business Times last month in the story, “UPMC Enterprises participates in fundraising rounds totaling $155M for three companies.”
Ouro Medicines: Therapeutics for People with Chronic Immune-Mediated Diseases
Chronic immune-mediated diseases include conditions where the body’s own immune cells play a key role in the disease, including systemic lupus erythematosus, scleroderma, rheumatoid arthritis, Sjögren’s, and myositis. Treatments for these diseases typically require ongoing immunosuppressive therapy that may be minimally effective and with high levels of toxicity and side effects.
Ouro Medicines, which launched last month with $120 million from investors, including UPMC Enterprises, is working to address that challenge by developing a type of immune therapy that aims to eliminate the pathogenic immune cells and reset the immune system to a state before it started causing the disease. Known as immune cell depletion, this approach has the potential to create long periods of remission where immunosuppression is unnecessary.
Ouro’s work is focused on B-cell and autoantibody mediated diseases and uses T cell engager antibodies to target B cells in the immune system. T cell engagers, or TCEs, have emerged as a promising off-the-shelf modality that are effective, accessible, and a potentially safer approach for targeting and depleting specific pathogenic cell populations that drive immune-mediated diseases.
UPMC Enterprises’ investment in Ouro was led by Ketki Karanam, Rob Hartman, Harrison Lands, Rosheema Bala, and Jamie Bauersmith on the Translational Sciences team.
“We see significant promise in immune cell depletion therapies and in Ouro’s work using TCEs to address diseases with high unmet need,” Karanam said. “We are excited about the opportunity to potentially bring Ouro’s therapies into the clinic at UPMC where we have tremendous expertise in treating immune-mediated diseases.”
Percipio Health: Revolutionizing Population Health Monitoring with AI
Remote patient monitoring can deliver significant value to providers, payers, and patients however its scalability within health systems has been limited in the past by challenges related to devices and other hardware.
Percipio Health aims to revolutionize the market with a monitoring platform that relies on the mobile devices we already carry and also leverages AI to collect and interpret data — all of which have the potential to address the scalability challenge.
The startup was founded by Eric Rock and David Lucas – the founders of previous Enterprises portfolio company Vivify Health — and launched recently after closing a $20 million Series A funding round, with UPMC Enterprises as one of its investors. The investment in Percipio was led by several members of the Digital Solutions team including Nick Shapiro, Matt Grant, and Michael Coutino, as well as support from Tyler Crawford and Maryam Jalal.
By delivering personalized, predictive insights, Percipio enables earlier diagnoses, more targeted interventions, and better patient outcomes. These insights can be of great value to payers and providers who will gain a deeper understanding of their patient populations which may lead to lower costs and better outcomes.
“Asynchronous monitoring is among the most powerful tools for the future of health care, enabled by the efficiencies of AI,” said Andrew R. Watson, MD, MLitt, FACS, a UPMC surgeon and Senior Medical Advisor at UPMC Enterprises.
Read more about Percipio on the UPMC Enterprises blog.
Spark Pediatrics: Giving Medically Complex Children ‘the Childhood They Deserve’
More than 3 million children in the U.S. are medically complex because they have life-threatening conditions that affect two or more organ systems. Unfortunately, this number is expected to double over the next decade, creating access challenges in pediatric health care.
To address this challenge, Spark Pediatrics has developed Prescribed Pediatric Extended Care (PPEC) centers that operate on a team-orientated care delivery model and are staffed by pediatrics skilled nurses and other care providers.
With a $15 million investment by UPMC Enterprises and other investors, Spark is targeting growth in new markets, increasing innovative value-based offerings in partnership with health systems and health plans for medically complex children, and investing in building its world class team.
Mary Beth Navarra-Sirio, Nick Shapiro, Maryam Jalal, Dan Tarpey, and Ben Almassi led the investment for the Digital Solutions team.
“Spark is creating a new model of care delivery for children with medical complexities that is aimed at improving quality of care and the family experience for this often-overlooked population,” Mary Beth said. “This aligns well with our focus on creating innovations that impact the lives of patients in meaningful, lasting ways. We are thrilled to support Spark in bringing this innovative option to more children and families.”
For more information, read Spark’s press release.
