Remote blood collection device maker YourBio Health is revamping its leadership team with the goal of broadening the reach of its push-button, sample-harvesting hardware across clinical trials and home diagnostic tests.
The Flagship Pioneering portfolio company appointed Paul Owen as its CEO last year, who previously served as head of the Mayo Clinic co-founded pharmacogenomics outfit OneOme.
Owen was also named a CEO-partner at Flagship, and, now, he’s tagging in new members for the C-suite at YourBio—including Chester Robson as chief medical officer, Michael Mina, M.D., Ph.D., as chief scientific officer and Thomas Briggs as chief growth officer.
“Every one of the individuals that I brought in I've worked with in the past, in one capacity or another,” Owen told Fierce Medtech in an interview. “They know all the different aspects of this space. I really feel like having an experienced team of individuals running an organization like YourBio Health is really kind of unprecedented.”
Robson has previously been CMO at Jasper Health and MDisrupt, as well as Imaware Health, where Owen held a stint as president and interim CEO. Robson has also served as chief clinical officer of pharmacy services for Walgreens Healthcare Clinics and helped lead its telehealth programs during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Mina, meanwhile, helped steer the Biden administration’s Test to Treat program aimed at providing at-home diagnostics and spent time as chief scientific and medical officer for eMed Digital Healthcare. He has also been a professor of epidemiology, immunology and infectious diseases at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and a professor in the pathology department at Harvard Medical School.
Briggs previously led collaborations and partnerships for BD’s specimen management business, including specialty blood collection products, and before that held roles in in vitro diagnostic development at Abbott, BioMerieux and Johnson & Johnson.
YourBio Health was first founded by Flagship in 2011 as Seventh Sense Biosystems. The company rebranded in mid-2021 during the COVID-19 pandemic to underline its focus on telehealth and at-home testing.
Its TAP Micro and TAP Micro Select devices—short for touch-activated phlebotomy—adhere to the skin and deploy an array of thin, short microneedles to draw whole blood out of the capillaries.
Owen describes the process as virtually painless and capable of delivering sample volumes similar to what hospitals are processing today.
“They’re already used to it in the laboratory, they already understand using capillary blood as a regular part of their practice,” he said. “So we’re not trying to change anything—other than the fact that the way most of the blood collected today is either by venous draw, or through a finger prick or through a heel prick.”
“And if you think about the experience—I'm a grandfather now, but I've had to take my own children to the doctor—nobody likes that process. So it's a win-win-win for all of the individuals involved.”
The TAP devices have collected regulatory green lights in the U.S. and Europe, and YourBio is pursuing an expanded FDA clearance that will allow them to be used at home by the public, for everything from telehealth testing to annual physicals.
Last year, YourBio announced it had provided more than 500,000 of its TAP Micro Selects to Myriad Genetics for its SneakPeek at-home prenatal DNA testing kits.
YourBio will also work with other companies in Flagship’s orbit to aid in the development of drugs and diagnostic tests through decentralized clinical trials.
“That remote capability, and meeting the patients where they are—we've even had a few trials end early,” Owen said. “They’ve seen a much larger retention rate than they ever had in the past … and the demographics were much broader than what they've had in previous experiences.”