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XForget Opioids, Virtual Reality Could Be the Future of Pain Management
Keerthi Vedantam is a bioscience reporter at dot.LA. She cut her teeth covering everything from cloud computing to 5G in San Francisco and Seattle. Before she covered tech, Keerthi reported on tribal lands and congressional policy in Washington, D.C. Connect with her on Twitter, Clubhouse (@keerthivedantam) or Signal at 408-470-0776.

It's hard to overstate just how painful a process treating burn victims is – for burn victims, air itself is excruciatingly painful. They have to undergo weeks of undressing wounds, cleaning the tender skin of debris, slathering the area with ointment, and redressing it with new bandages, and it is considered one of the most physically painful treatments in medicine. To combat this, most patients rely on consistent and heavy opioid usage.
But in 2008, University of Washington researchers published the first study of its kind using virtual reality (VR) to mitigate the use of the highly-addictive drugs. The researchers replaced the clinical hospital setting with a computer-generated snowtopia where patients could throw snowballs with penguins and snowmen through a VR headset as doctors washed the treatment area. It worked, and the study concluded that VR could replace part of an opioid dose.
A decade later, VR medicine has taken off, spawning a clutch of companies and a new field of study for what is considered one of the most promising and powerful noninvasive tools to treat pain. It's now a growing part of an $885.7 million VR health care industry.
In the eyes of Jeffrey I. Gold, a pain management doctor at the Children's Hospital Los Angeles, it's the future of medicine, as virtual reality has the potential of eliminating the need for billions of dollars worth of drugs.
If Gold is right, as researchers are increasingly finding, this could have a ripple effect across the healthcare industry eventually lowering health care costs as patients rely less on drugs to offset pain.
"That's really where VR needs to go, is into the place where you can start reducing the need for certain types of medicines that may have side effects." Gold said.
How VR Works to Mitigate Pain
Conventional pain management techniques rely on distractions like blowing bubbles with younger patients or administering pain relievers or sedation. Unlike those, VR has the unique ability to manipulate how the brain processes pain by engaging the senses with powerful immersive experiences.
Gold published a study looking at how VR impacted pain in children. Researchers gave children aged 12 to 17 who were getting blood drawn VR headsets and instructed them to play a game made specifically to soothe pain. Once they put on the set, health care workers drew blood.
They then compared the experience to children who were given traditional distraction methods like bubbles or reading a book, and soothing techniques.
The study found children who used VR during their procedures felt less pain and anxiety than children who didn't.
"People always talk about, 'you're just distracting the kid like, 'hey, look over here'.' Well, that's not what we're doing," Gold said. "It's a little bit more involved with regards to immersion, presence, something we call cognitive load."
One way to think about pain is like an "alarm" the brain sets off. VR directs the brain to set off more relaxing "sounds" in the form of a visual and audible world that forces the senses to experience something else. This drowns out that "alarm" created by the pain. The brain, effectively, does not register the needle placement as as painful as it would be without VR.
The study confirmed what researchers have been seeing for years. But what excited Gold was its potential for children: By making procedures more engaging and less painful, children with chronic conditions may become less fearful about treating their condition, he said.
"For a child to have a positive experience on a routine procedure, that can be a game changer for that kid."
Other researchers looking at the use of VR are finding that not only does the technology engage the patient's senses, but in some cases it can act as a support network, much like a family. Another study by Cedars-Sinai Los Angeles used VR to assist women going into labor with painful contractions. Researchers put a headset on women in labor showing them soothing animated scenes of nature that pulsated, almost as if the elements were breathing. A calm voice used words of encouragement to help the mother through contractions.
Women who used the VR reported lower levels of pain and anxiety, much like the children.
"What I think was so impactful about this particular intervention, actually, is that what they were hearing was very much the same things ... you might hear from a doula" said Dr. Melissa Wong, maternal-fetal medicine specialist at Cedars-Sinai Los Angeles who led the study.
'A Pharmacy of VR'
Wong's study at Cedars-Sinai indicated VR could be an alternative to epidurals or nitrous oxide – two common pain management solutions used during labor. But, even more than that, it pointed to a slew of history that shows pain is not just an acute or chronic sensation in the body that causes your brain to raise alarm, it's also the environment around you.
Wong said one of the strongest indicators of whether or not patients ask for epidurals during labor is whether or not they have a birth support person in the form of a partner, family member or doula. Patients that don't are more likely to need an epidural.
"So it's suggesting, again, that [pain] is sort of the entire way in which everything is being approached, rather than just literally the pain fibers," said Wong.
In other words, pain isn't simply a feeling. It is also a patient's support system, surroundings and mental fitness. By taking patients out of a clinical hospital setting of linoleum floors and wheeling carts and into a magical virtual world that has its own soundscapes and therapeutic guides, their pain can appear to be far less than what it might be.
Brennan Spiegel, a doctor at Cedars-Sinai Los Angeles who oversees virtual reality programs, coined "a pharmacy of VR" -- the idea that VR therapies should be created to help specific situations, like going through labor, dressing a burn wound, undergoing chemotherapy or having an anxiety attack.
But the industry is still young and many of the devices have yet to gain full Food and Drug Administration approval. Still, there's growing demand.
Companies Are Getting Involved
Companies like seven-year-old Alameda-based KindVR are using virtual reality programs to soothe pediatric patients before an MRI and calm them before an operation. XRHealth, a five-year-old company based in Massachusetts, offers a host of applications designed to treat physical immobility and mental health.
And the six-year-old Los Angeles-based AppliedVR developed a suite of VR-based "video games" meant to soothe anxiety for veterans and treat acute pain for people giving birth and burn victims. The company has raised around $34 million to date, the most any startup in the chronic pain market has raised, and valued at over $67 million, according to Pitchbook.
Following the idea of a 'pharmacy for VR', AppliedVR has two opioid-sparing treatments -- one for patients to use to help with acute pain, and one for chronic pain. The effects of chronic pain are often long lasting stress and a feat of moving, which is why the company incorporates cognitive behavioral therapy into the treatment.
Their chronic pain product is EaseVRx, a VR device used in an eight-week program that takes patients through different educational and training modules to explain to them how stress can affect pain, how they can avoid stress, and how to utilize breathing and acceptance-based therapy to reduce pain long after taking off the VR headset.
Laura Garcia, director of research, design and product innovation at AppliedVR said the company found that patients are able to utilize the benefits of VR up to six months after taking off the headset.
"While you're in the headset, you're able to learn your skill sets and change your brain so that you're able to cope with the pain differently," she said. "So imagine having a pill that gives you benefits and relieves [pain] for the time that you use the pill for, but also six months after."
Correction: An earlier version of this misidentified EaseVRx and misstated the length of its VR training program.
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Keerthi Vedantam is a bioscience reporter at dot.LA. She cut her teeth covering everything from cloud computing to 5G in San Francisco and Seattle. Before she covered tech, Keerthi reported on tribal lands and congressional policy in Washington, D.C. Connect with her on Twitter, Clubhouse (@keerthivedantam) or Signal at 408-470-0776.
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A New Tide of LA Startups Is Tackling the National Childcare Crisis
Keerthi Vedantam is a bioscience reporter at dot.LA. She cut her teeth covering everything from cloud computing to 5G in San Francisco and Seattle. Before she covered tech, Keerthi reported on tribal lands and congressional policy in Washington, D.C. Connect with her on Twitter, Clubhouse (@keerthivedantam) or Signal at 408-470-0776.
The pandemic exacerbated a problem that has been long bubbling in the U.S.: the childcare crisis.
According to a survey of people in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) careers conducted by the city’s WiSTEM Los Angeles program and shared exclusively with dot.LA, the pandemic exposed a slew of challenges across STEM fields. The survey—which consisted of 181 respondents from L.A.County and was conducted between March 2021 and 2022— involved respondents across medical fields, technical professions and science industries who shared the pandemic’s effects on their professional or education careers.
The survey found 60% of the respondents, primarily women, were balancing increased caretaking roles with work or school responsibilities. And while caretaking responsibilities grew, 49% of respondents said their workload also increased during the pandemic.
“The pandemic threw a wrench into lots of folks' experiences both professionally and academically,” said Kathryne Cooper, a health tech investor who sits on the advisory board of WiSTEM. “So we need to acknowledge that.”
In the L.A. area, an increasing number of childcare startups are aiming to address this massive challenge that is a growing national crisis. The U.S. has long dealt with a crippling childcare infrastructure plagued by low wages and a labor shortage in preschools and daycares, but the COVID-19 crisis made it worse. During the pandemic, women left the workforce due to the lack of childcare and caretaking resources. By 2021, women made up the lowest percentage of the workforce since 1988, according to the National Women’s Law Center. Despite the pandemic forcing everyone indoors, caretaking duties fell disproportionately on women.
“I almost actually left my job because everything that I looked at was either waitlisted or the costs were so astronomical that it probably made sense for me to stay at home rather than pay someone to actually look after my child,” said Jessica Chang, the CEO of childcare startup WeeCare.
The Marina del Rey-based WeeCare, one of the startups that helps people open their own childcare facilities, announced it raised $12 million in April (to go along with an additional $5 million in bridge funding raised during the pandemic). The company helps people build daycare centers and works with employers to provide access to WeeCare centers and construct child care benefits programs.
Some of these startups strive to boost the number of daycare centers by helping operators with financial costs, licensing fees and scheduling. Wonderschool, a San Francisco-based child care startup, raised $25 million in January and assisted with hundreds of childcare facilities in L.A.-based Playground, which raised $3 million in seed funding last year per PitchBook. Playground acts as an in-house platform for childcare providers to communicate with staff and parents, track attendance, report student behavior and provide automatic invoicing services.
L.A.-based Brella, which launched in 2019, raised $5 million in seed funding in January to create a tech-enabled daycare scheduling platform that could meet the demand of flexible childcare as parents navigate a hybrid work environment, and recently opened a new location in Hollywood. The startup aims to address the labor shortage among childcare workers by paying its workers roughly $25 an hour and offering mental health benefits and career development opportunities for its educators.
“It's this huge disconnect in our society because these are really important people who are doing arguably one of the most important educational jobs,” said Melanie Wolff, co-founder of childcare startup Brella. “They often don't get benefits. They don't have a lot of job security.”
Venture capital funding has poured into the relatively new childcare sector. A slew of parent-tech companies aimed at finding flexible child care and monitoring children saw $1.4 billion worth of venture investments in 2021, according to PitchBook, largely to meet the demands of parents in a pandemic era who have more flexible work commutes and require more tech-enabled solutions.
“I think a lot of it has to do with what employers expect for workers,” said Darby Saxbe, an associate professor of psychology and family relationships expert at USC. “There's still a lot more stigma for men to build their work around caregiving responsibilities–there's a lot of evidence that men are often discouraged from taking paternity leave, even if it's available.”
Childcare benefits are also becoming a more attractive incentive as workers grapple with unorthodox work schedules in a hybrid setting.
“Employers, because of COVID, were having a hard time retaining and recruiting employees,” said Chang. “And they were actually incentivized to actually find a solution to help the employees.”
WeeCare primarily partners with employers of essential workers, like schools, hospitals and grocery stores, and the benefits programs account for the majority of WeeCare’s revenue.
Childcare works are part of a massive labor shortage in caretaker roles that also include nurses, and health aids for the eldery. These workers, which allow women to maintain careers in STEM and other high-paying industries, are vital, according to Saxbe.
“Women can advance in the workplace,” Saxbe said. “But if there's no support at home and there is no one who is helping take care of kids and elderly people, women can't just advance in a vacuum.”
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Keerthi Vedantam is a bioscience reporter at dot.LA. She cut her teeth covering everything from cloud computing to 5G in San Francisco and Seattle. Before she covered tech, Keerthi reported on tribal lands and congressional policy in Washington, D.C. Connect with her on Twitter, Clubhouse (@keerthivedantam) or Signal at 408-470-0776.
“Talent Is Ubiquitous; Access to Capital Is Not': MaC Venture Capital Raises $203M for Early-Stage Startups
Decerry Donato is dot.LA's Editorial Fellow. Prior to that, she was an editorial intern at the company. Decerry received her bachelor's degree in literary journalism from the University of California, Irvine. She continues to write stories to inform the community about issues or events that take place in the L.A. area. On the weekends, she can be found hiking in the Angeles National forest or sifting through racks at your local thrift store.
While venture capital funding has taken a hit this year, that hasn’t stopped MaC Venture Capital from raising $203 million for its second fund.
The Los Angeles-based, Black-led VC firm said Monday that it had surpassed its initial $200 million goal for the fund, which dot.LA reported in January, over the span of seven months. MaC said it expects to invest the capital in up to 50 mostly seed-stage startups while remaining “sector-agnostic.”
“We love seed-stage companies because that’s where most of the value is created,” MaC managing general partner Marlon Nichols told dot.LA. While the firm has invested in local ventures like NFT gaming platform Artie, space startup Epsilon3 and autonomous sensor company Spartan Radar, Nichols said MaC—whose portfolio companies span from Seattle to Nairobi—would continue to eye ventures across the rest of the country and world.
“Talent is ubiquitous; access to capital is not,” Nichols noted. “What they’re building needs to matter; we’ve got to believe that this group of founders is the best team building in the space, period.”
Launched in 2019, MaC is led by four founding partners: VC veteran Nichols, former Washington, D.C. mayor Adrian Fenty, and former William Morris Endeavor talent agents Charles D. King and Michael Palank. Nichols described the team’s collective background in government, consulting, media, entertainment and talent management as its “superpower.”
In a venture capital industry where few people of color are decision-makers, MaC Venture Capital has looked to wield its influence to provide opportunities for founders of color. The firm says 69% of its portfolio companies were started by BIPOC founders and 36% are led by women, while MaC has also diversified its own ranks by adding female partners Zhenni Liu and Haley Farnsworth.
MaC’s second investment fund nearly doubled the size of the firm’s $110 million first fund, which it closed in March 2021. The new fund’s repeat institutional investors include Goldman Sachs, ICG Advisors, StepStone, the University of Michigan, the George Kaiser Family Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation, while the likes of Illumen Capital and the Teachers’ Retirement System of the State of Illinois also pitched in as new investors.
“It’s a great combination of having affirmation from people who have been with us from the beginning and new people coming in that want to be a part of it,” Fenty told dot.LA.
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Decerry Donato is dot.LA's Editorial Fellow. Prior to that, she was an editorial intern at the company. Decerry received her bachelor's degree in literary journalism from the University of California, Irvine. She continues to write stories to inform the community about issues or events that take place in the L.A. area. On the weekends, she can be found hiking in the Angeles National forest or sifting through racks at your local thrift store.
California Debates Data Privacy as SCOTUS Allows Abortion Bans
Keerthi Vedantam is a bioscience reporter at dot.LA. She cut her teeth covering everything from cloud computing to 5G in San Francisco and Seattle. Before she covered tech, Keerthi reported on tribal lands and congressional policy in Washington, D.C. Connect with her on Twitter, Clubhouse (@keerthivedantam) or Signal at 408-470-0776.
The United States Supreme Court called a Mississippi law banning abortion after 15 weeks constitutional on Friday, overturning the country’s founding abortion rights decision Roe v. Wade. The Supreme Court also upheld that there cannot be any restriction on how far into a pregnancy abortion can be banned.
When Politico first broke the news months before SCOTUS’s final ruling, a slew of bills entered Congress to protect data privacy and prevent the sale of data, which can be triangulated to see if a person has had an abortion or if they are seeking an abortion and have historically been used by antiabortion individuals who would collect this information during their free time.
Democratic lawmakers led by Congresswoman Anna Eshoo called on Google to stop collecting location data. The chair of the Federal Trade Commission has long voiced plans for the agency to prevent data collection. A week after the news, California Assembly passed A.B. 2091, a law that would prevent insurance companies and medical providers from sharing information in abortion-related cases (the state Senate is scheduled to deliberate on it in five days).
These scattered bills attempt to do what health privacy laws do not. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA, was established in 1996 when the Internet was still young and most people carried flip phones. The act declared health institutions were not allowed to share or disclose patients’ health information. Google, Apple and a slew of fertility and health apps are not covered under HIPAA, and fertility app data can be subpoenaed by law enforcement.
California’s Confidentiality of Medical Information Act (or CMIA), goes further than HIPAA by encompassing apps that store medical information under the broader umbrella of health institutions that include insurance companies and medical providers. And several how-tos on protecting data privacy during Roe v. Wade have been published in the hours of the announcement.
But reproductive rights organizations say data privacy alone cannot fix the problem. According to reproductive health policy think tank Guttmacher Institute, the closest state with abortion access to 1.3 million out-of-state women of reproductive age is California. One report from the UCLA Center on Reproductive Health, Law and Policy estimates as many as 9,400 people will travel to Los Angeles County every year to get abortions, and that number will grow as more states criminalize abortions.
Keerthi Vedantam is a bioscience reporter at dot.LA. She cut her teeth covering everything from cloud computing to 5G in San Francisco and Seattle. Before she covered tech, Keerthi reported on tribal lands and congressional policy in Washington, D.C. Connect with her on Twitter, Clubhouse (@keerthivedantam) or Signal at 408-470-0776.