After landing a job at the life sciences incubator Flagship Pioneering earlier this summer, former FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn, M.D., will now serve a stint as the interim medical chief at one of the venture firm’s portfolio companies focused on blood collection and COVID-19 diagnostics.
Rebranded earlier this month as YourBio Health, the company has put forward a push-button blood draw device that aims to make the process quick and painless. Formerly known as Seventh Sense Biosystems, the company was first founded by Flagship in 2011.
YourBio also offers postvaccine antibody testing for COVID-19—through at-home sample collection kits currently available in the U.K.—that people may take after receiving a shot from another Flagship venture, Moderna.
During his tenure as head of the Trump administration’s FDA, Hahn saw the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic and its ensuing waves across the country and helped oversee the authorization of vaccines from Moderna, Johnson & Johnson as well as Pfizer and BioNTech—not to mention dozens of emergency green lights for coronavirus diagnostic tests and other devices.
Now, Hahn carries the title of chief medical officer-at-large for Flagship’s Preemptive Medicine and Health Security Initiative. And at YourBio, the former chief medical executive of MD Anderson Cancer Center will also provide his clinical and commercial know-how as the company looks to launch new products with an eye on providing remote blood testing hardware for telehealth platforms.
At the top of this month, YourBio gathered $21 million in new funding from Flagship and Newpath Partners to help accelerate the adoption of the newest version of its micro-needle device, the TAP II, which draws a sample from the upper arm over two to three minutes and deposits it into a detachable container. The TAP II system received a CE mark in Europe this past February.
“The rebranding from Seventh Sense to YourBio Health comes at a defining moment in our company’s history and better reflects who we are today,” Executive Chairman Harry Wilcox said in a statement.
“Our plan is to give people access to their biological information in a way that gives them more control over their health decisions,” Wilcox said. “With the movement toward telehealth and personalized medicine, we are well-positioned to play our part in shaping the future of healthcare by providing solutions that people want.”