It’s the hero the world deserves and is certainly the one the world needs right now. Sorry Christopher Nolan, we had to adjust Gotham’s Dark Knight to the World’s White Knight amidst the COVID-19 outbreak.
Back in November, FanX co-founder Bryan Brandenburg unveiled his newest biotech company, Zenerchi, to Grit Daily News, which has been in the works for decades, going back to Brandenburg’s years and involvement in the biotech industry—long before the 2013 birth of FanX in Salt Lake City, Utah.
Since mid-2019, the company has been expanding its technology platform to help empower new wellness and medical uses across industries such as the entertainment, education, and exhibition sectors.
Zenerchi’s technology platform is built upon open-source physiology simulation software that was developed by teams at Stanford University, MIT, Indiana University, Harvard’s Medical School and the U.S. Department of Defense.
But the one thing Brandenburg and Zenerchi couldn’t have predicted…was COVID-19. Since the outbreak of the coronavirus, we have watched our world literally “shut down” with millions (and even billions) of people forced to isolate themselves in a manner that makes binging Netflix just godawful.
With the support from the above-mentioned institutions, Zenerchi’s collective vision has been able to expand into the medical field, specifically with medical device simulations.
In November’s interview with Grit Daily, Brandenburg explained:
“We have developed an interface into our practical physiology where across all of the major anatomy systems from cardiovascular, circulatory, nervous system, digestive, endocrine, and so on, we can drill down from major to minor systems going from the circulatory system to the heart and arteries to heart tissue to heart cells to the proteins and molecules that make up the tissue all the way down to the atomic and subatomic level.”
But now, since the COVID-19 outbreak has continued to spread and take a significant medical toll on our world, Brandenburg has taken his new company’s potential to the next level by leveraging the platform to create educational and time-sensitive content surrounding the pandemic.
And at a time where industries are shut down and funding is essentially ceased—Brandenburg has been able to secure half-a-million dollars in funding. The company recently disclosed that it has expanded its initial round of $1.2 million in seed funding from private accredited investors to $1.775 million—now preparing for a $5 million funding round later this year with institutional investors.
Now, fake news aside, it’s important to understand the distinction between the “coronavirus” and COVID-19.
Coronaviruses, which have been around for centuries, are a large family of viruses which may cause illness in animals or humans. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), several coronaviruses in humans are known to cause respiratory infections ranging from the common cold to more severe diseases such as Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) and Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS). The most recently discovered coronavirus causes coronavirus disease…better known as COVID-19. This was previously unknown before its initial outbreak in Wuhan, China back in December 2019.
According to the company’s recent press release and KUTV News in Utah, Zenerchi’s platform has created advanced coronavirus visualizations which include the human cell, the flu, and COVID-19 along with its nucleus, proteins, and associated chains and amino acids.
This couldn’t be more necessary where even in a time of global pandemic and illness, fake news continues to spread across the internet, with individuals thinking they know everything there is to know about the coronavirus. Well, leave it to the professionals, folks.
In efforts to support the now millions of people affected by COVID-19, Zenerchi has used its biomedical simulation/visualization and A.I. solution to produce a high-level educational video, which highlights the past epidemics and comparing it to the 2020 Coronavirus we are now experiencing globally…together.
The company has created a YouTube version of its platform’s visualization and simulation for public distribution:
“That kind of visualization is now available on modern devices but we can drill down in a fantastic voyage paradigm and provide a level of understanding that is unprecedented,” Brandenburg previously shared with Grit Daily. “If you look at where all the breakthroughs are being made in the medical community, it’s not about gross anatomy medical products anymore; it’s about pharmaceutical products that are re-engineering and creating new proteins that create a paradigm shift in the biochemistry and physiology. Being able to visualize at a protein and molecular level is the right thing at the right time.”
Late Thursday afternoon, Zenerchi announced that Brandon Fugal, Utah Chairman of real estate giant Colliers International, will be joining the company’s board alongside Brandenburg, award-winning bio-tech entrepreneur and venture capitalist, Dr. Dinesh Patel, and Symantec’s executive Rod Turner.
Fugal also serves as the owner of Skinwalker Ranch, which is the subject of an upcoming killer series that will premiere on the History Channel beginning [DATE] and continuing on Tuesday nights at 8pm MST.
So, having watched the video, it’s beautiful to see the foresight from a former convention owner to move into an extreme visual technology at the exact moment it became what all of us need. But more importantly, this only validates the immediate need for new level visualization technologies like Utah’s Zenerchi.
The world will not stop turning…and neither will we.
