Author: Healthcare Propulsion Staff

Check out today’s featured companies who have recently raised a round of funding, and be sure to check out the full list of past healthcare IT fundings. HelmGuard Raises $7.3M Seed Round to Replace Compliance Paperwork with AI Agents that Verify Risk Directly HelmGuard, the agentic governance, risk and compliance (GRC) and security platform co-founded by a former Palantir executive, today announced a $7.3M seed round, co-led by Infinity Ventures and Frontline, with participation from FinTech Collective, Stage 2 Capital, and Entrepreneurs First. The company’s AI agents collect and assess risk signals directly from source systems, cutting assessment cycles from…

The following is a guest article by Baha Zeidan, CEO at Azalea Health Healthcare has always been a human business. Yet, somewhere along the way, the technology designed to help clinicians began demanding more of their attention than their patients. Healthcare teams started serving technology instead of it serving them. This evolution has brought healthcare systems to a critical inflection point in balancing administrative requirements with providing high-quality clinical care. One where technology needs to be a system of action, not just a system of record. Outdated electronic health record (EHR) platforms have contributed to a range of challenges, including…

Why do genetic variants that increase the risk of autoimmune disease remain so common in the population? A new study, published Sept. 11, 2026, in The American Journal of Human Genetics provides one possible answer: some genetic variants that increase the risk of lupus may also make the immune system better at fighting viruses. In this study, a research team led by Leah Kottyan, PhD, Matthew Weirauch, PhD, and Stephen Waggoner, PhD focused on a common lupus-associated genetic haplotype linked to IRF7, a transcription factor that plays a central role in the antiviral immune response. Systemic lupus erythematosus, or lupus,…

A research team at Huntsman Cancer Institute at the University of Utah (the U) has found that obesity prevents a biological process that kills cancerous cells, revealing a possible reason why obesity is a risk factor for breast cancer.  We uncovered the role of a molecule that normally appears in lean tissue that restrains breast cancer growth but is less present with obesity. We know obesity is often a driver of breast cancer, and researchers in our field usually consider how obesity is promoting the disease. But we hadn’t really considered that obesity could also be the loss of something that naturally protects us.”  Keren Hilgendorf,…

Adelaide University researchers have developed a new way of using mRNA technology to reprogram tumor-supporting immune cells and strengthen the body’s anti-cancer immune response.The scientific team, spanning engineering, biomedical, oncology and immunology experts, has developed tiny, targeted particles that could help the immune system fight cancer by reprogramming immune cells within the tumor environment.The findings have been published in Science Advances today.The new approach uses lipid nanoparticles – the same delivery technology used to deliver mRNA in COVID-19 vaccines – to target a type of immune cell that can help tumors evade the body’s defences.In animal experiments, the nanoparticles were…

People with autism often come at life from a different angle-seeing details others miss, focusing on patterns rather than faces, experiencing heightened or dimmed physical sensations. Although researchers have tracked some of the many ways the neurodevelopmental disorder alters perception of the world, the precise brain mechanisms involved remain obscure, says Boston University researcher Benjamin Scott. One reason: research often excludes people with more severe symptoms. Scott and his colleagues have created a more inclusive approach, a video game that measures how people with autism understand and interpret information-and that can be played by those across the disorder’s spectrum of…

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration this week granted permission for investigators at the University of Colorado Anschutz to conduct a clinical trial testing genetically engineered immune cells in adults with advanced colorectal cancer and pediatric patients with solid cancers who have exhausted standard treatment options. The experimental CAR T-cell therapy was developed by researchers at CU Anschutz and will be manufactured at the campus’ Gates Biomanufacturing Facility. The cells are designed to attack two targets associated with cancer: B7-H3, a protein found on most colorectal tumors, and IL-8, a protein that helps promote tumor growth, inflammation and the spread of…

What makes the brain fall asleep? For nearly a century, scientists have looked to structures deep within the brain for the answer. In the traditional view, these regions control when we sleep and wake, while the cerebral cortex-the part of the brain involved in perception, thought, and memory-is largely a passive follower. A new study led by Renata Batista-Brito, PhD, Associate Professor of Neuroscience at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and published September 9 in Nature [https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-10876-y], suggests that this picture is incomplete. The study team discovered an extraordinarily rare population of neurons in the cortex-called Sst-Chodl…

Scientists identified a new vision condition linked to a gene already connected to a different vision-loss disease. While the previously identified disease causes loss of central vision, the new condition affects peripheral and night vision. The two different conditions are caused by two different variants in the same gene, according to an international team of scientists that included researchers from the Scheie Eye Institute of the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. No name has been formally given for the newly discovered condition, but the researchers are referring to it as EFEMP1-associated late-onset retinal degeneration (L-ORD). It…

New research to be presented at the Annual Meeting of The European Association for the Study of Diabetes (EASD) in Milan, Italy (Sept 28 – Oct 2) shows that, in people living with diabetes (type 1 or 2) using data from continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) devices paired with daily quality-of-life ratings, days with more widely fluctuating glucose readings (while still within safe limits) are followed by days with a better quality life compared to days with more stricter control– suggesting the burden of that stricter control could be preventing those individuals with stricter control from enjoying various activities. The study…