was previously founding CEO of Cambridge-based diagnostics startup T2 Biosystems, founded Seventh Sense with the three inventors and R. Rox Anderson, a top dermatologist and director of the Wellman Center of Photomedicine at Massachusetts General Hospital.
The firm was founded around the notion of engineering the bioactive pigments to temporarily sit just below the top surface of the skin, where patients could see changes in color or appearance to easily monitor their health over a period of days or weeks. Another potential application of the technology is to load the pigments into thin adhesive strips that could easily be worn on the body. Though Levinson didn’t offer many details on how, the monitors would access trace amounts of fluid from beneath the surface of the skin to react with the pigments and monitor certain health conditions.
Levinson believes that the adhesive version, which wouldn’t require anything to be put into patients’ bodies, offers fewer regulatory hurdles and could be brought to the market more quickly than the version that would require bioactive pigments to sit below the outer layer of our skin. The firm plans to develop its first product for use in clinical settings such as hospitals, but the long-term vision is to develop health monitors simple enough for people to apply themselves in their homes.
Seventh Sense has assembled a team of directors and advisors with experience in navigating both technological and regulatory hurdles. On the regulatory side, the startup has attracted to its board of directors Peter Hutt, a powerful Washington, D.C. healthcare attorney who was chief counsel of the FDA from 1971 and 1975. Also, David Walt, professor of chemistry at Tufts University and successful entrepreneur, is a scientific advisor to the startup and meets weekly with the company to help steer the direction of its technology development, Levinson says. Walt is a scientific co-founder of Illumina (NASDAQ:[[ticker:ILMN]]), a major provider of genetic sequencing and analysis products based in San Diego. He also founded Cambridge-based startup Quanterix, which is developing tools to analyze the activities of thousands of individual molecules at the same time and plans to develop the technology for early cancer detection.
Levinson says he became intensely focused on the diagnostics market during his previous executive job as CEO at T2 Biosystems, which is developing a mobile device that incorporates magnetic resonance detection and advanced nanoparticle technology to diagnose complex medical conditions in doctors’ offices. Over recent decades, he notes, biomedical engineers have developed many more devices that provide quick diagnostic results in a medical office or at home, meaning patients’ samples don’t have to be sent to central laboratories. But most at-home diagnostics such as pregnancy tests and blood-sugar tests still cause lifestyle interruptions, he says. At Seventh Sense, Levinson and his team aim to change that, creating technologies that give patients actionable information without making them stop to provide a blood or urine sample.
“The goal would be that we can actually incorporate into our own physiology a way to sense important health conditions,” Levinson says.
