M&A

Houston workforce training startup acquired by California company

Ampersand has been acquired by a college loan and student services provider based in San Diego. Photo ampersandpro.com

A Houston startup, founded to streamline and optimize the intern-company relationship, has been acquired by a student loan and services provider.

San Diego, California-based Ascent, a collegiate student loan company that also provides student support services, announced it has acquired Ampersand, a software platform that provides skills training to young professionals. The news was announced today, July 27, coinciding with National Intern Day.

With the acquisition, Allie Danziger, co-founder and CEO of Ampersand, joins Ascent as senior vice president and general manager of student success. She will lead the company's educational program that focuses on equipping students with skills from education to employment.

“Since launching Ampersand in 2020, we’ve received constant praise from employers, students, and universities on the real education-to-employment skills gap we are filling,” says Danziger in a news release. “I take immense pride in the fact that we’ve helped thousands of students enter the workforce with confidence, earn higher salaries, and get set on the right career path. I know joining the Ascent team will unlock even more opportunities for our combined companies, expanding our collective impact to millions of students and job seekers.”

The demand for skilled young professionals continues to rise, explains the release, as internship participation declines over time — from 29.2 percent in 2018 to 17.6 percent in 2022, according to a report. Ascent recently announced it plans to roll out initiatives to increase students’ wages by $10 billion in five years. Acquiring Ampersand is one step toward this goal, says Ascent CEO and Co-Founder Ken Ruggiero.

“This move strengthens our ability to maximize outcomes by eliminating the education to employment skills gap, and further positions Ascent as a leader in student success focused on driving positive outcomes,” says Ruggiero in the release. “Ampersand’s custom tools and learning modules will continue to optimize the journey for our customers from classroom to career as they build confidence, secure jobs with livable salaries, and become successful members of the workforce.”

Ampersand's platform, which includes a wide collection of asynchronous professional development training, will be added to Ascent’s existing resources platform, the Student Success Program.

Danziger, who is an expert contributor to InnovationMap on the topics of interns, Gen-Z, and more, has grown her company to facilitate training and internship opportunities to over 7,000 young professionals. Ampersand was also a partner with the City of Houston's Hire Houston Youth program in 2022.

Ascent CEO and Co-Founder Ken Ruggiero will work with Allie Danziger, co-founder of Ampersand, in her new role as senior vice president and general manager of student success at Ascent. Photo via LinkedIn

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A research team housed out of the newly launched Rice Biotech Launch Pad received funding to scale tech that could slash cancer deaths in half. Photo via Rice University

A research funding agency has deployed capital into a team at Rice University that's working to develop a technology that could cut cancer-related deaths in half.

Rice researchers received $45 million from the National Institutes of Health's Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, or ARPA-H, to scale up development of a sense-and-respond implant technology. Rice bioengineer Omid Veiseh leads the team developing the technology as principal investigator.

“Instead of tethering patients to hospital beds, IV bags and external monitors, we’ll use a minimally invasive procedure to implant a small device that continuously monitors their cancer and adjusts their immunotherapy dose in real time,” he says in a news release. “This kind of ‘closed-loop therapy’ has been used for managing diabetes, where you have a glucose monitor that continuously talks to an insulin pump. But for cancer immunotherapy, it’s revolutionary.”

Joining Veiseh on the 19-person research project named THOR, which stands for “targeted hybrid oncotherapeutic regulation,” is Amir Jazaeri, co-PI and professor of gynecologic oncology at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. The device they are developing is called HAMMR, or hybrid advanced molecular manufacturing regulator.

“Cancer cells are continually evolving and adapting to therapy. However, currently available diagnostic tools, including radiologic tests, blood assays and biopsies, provide very infrequent and limited snapshots of this dynamic process," Jazaeri adds. "As a result, today’s therapies treat cancer as if it were a static disease. We believe THOR could transform the status quo by providing real-time data from the tumor environment that can in turn guide more effective and tumor-informed novel therapies.”

With a national team of engineers, physicians, and experts across synthetic biology, materials science, immunology, oncology, and more, the team will receive its funding through the Rice Biotech Launch Pad, a newly launched initiative led by Veiseh that exists to help life-saving medical innovation scale quickly.

"Rice is proud to be the recipient of the second major funding award from the ARPA-H, a new funding agency established last year to support research that catalyzes health breakthroughs," Rice President Reginald DesRoches says. "The research Rice bioengineer Omid Veiseh is doing in leading this team is truly groundbreaking and could potentially save hundreds of thousands of lives each year. This is the type of research that makes a significant impact on the world.”

The initial focus of the technology will be on ovarian cancer, and this funding agreement includes a first-phase clinical trial of HAMMR for the treatment of recurrent ovarian cancer that's expected to take place in the fourth year of THOR’s multi-year project.

“The technology is broadly applicable for peritoneal cancers that affect the pancreas, liver, lungs and other organs,” Veiseh says. “The first clinical trial will focus on refractory recurrent ovarian cancer, and the benefit of that is that we have an ongoing trial for ovarian cancer with our encapsulated cytokine ‘drug factory’ technology. We'll be able to build on that experience. We have already demonstrated a unique model to go from concept to clinical trial within five years, and HAMMR is the next iteration of that approach.”

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