(Nanobiosym founder Dr. Anita Goel)

 

Diagnostic biotech startup Nanobiosym has hired Finn Partners as its PR AOR.

Nanobiosym’s platform, Gene-RADAR, is a mobile health diagnosis unit. The technology was approved last month to test for the mosquito-borne illness Zika.

“We have been developing the science and technology, and now its FDA-approved, but people don’t really know we exist yet and what we’ve been up to,” said Nanobiosym founder, chair, and CEO Dr. Anita Goel. “There’s a lot of noise in the field. At this stage, the technology we’ve been working on and developing is at a point of readiness where we wanted to get a communications partner on-board that was sophisticated and that understood the policy implications of the technology.”

Finn Partners began working with Nanobiosym last month. The firm, Nanobiosym’s first AOR, is working to tell the company’s story, now that the platform has been approved, via media relations, public affairs, and stakeholder education about the science behind it.

Nanobiosym is also working with the Clinton Global Initiative to test pregnant women in Puerto Rico for Zika. Goel said the technology, which uses a small amount of blood to detect diseases like Zika, works well in a place like Puerto Rico, where the infrastructure has been damaged by Hurricane Maria and residents don’t have easy access to hospitals for tests.

Goel noted that the company has “kept a fairly low profile up to this point.”

“We try to stay away from the hype; a lot of companies in this space create a lot of hype,” Goel said. “I felt like it’s really important for the field of global and human health and clinical health that the right science and technology is responsibly communicated in a very careful way.”

Finn Partners has also started working with healthcare companies including cancer social network Belong.life and smartwatch tracking platform Somatix since the start of the year.

“The mission of our agency is that healthcare has to make a difference in the world by improving human health,” said Gil Bashe, global health managing partner at Finn Partners. “Our priority is to work through [Goel] and her vision to make people understand this is a science that can be realized, that can make a difference in the human condition, and we need to understand how.”