prelesion The precision medicine company has added a new investor as it struggles to gain regulatory approval for a technology designed to provide early warnings to patients at risk of developing sepsis.
New investor PACE Healthcare Capital brings the Chicago-based company’s total fundraising to more than $20 million. Prenosis does not disclose PACE’s investments or other investors.
Like other startups, Prenosis is harnessing the power of artificial intelligence to better understand how a patient’s disease develops. For Prenosis, the initial focus was on sepsis, a life-threatening infectious reaction that kills 350,000 people in the U.S. and 11 million globally each year.
Standard tests for sepsis are inaccurate and can lead to delays in treatment, increasing the risk of death, Prenosis co-founder and CEO Bobby Reddy Jr. wrote in an emailed response to questions.
Doctors rely on parameters such as temperature, heart rate and total white blood cell count, Reddy wrote. Prenosis has built biological and clinical datasets to better understand sepsis. The data has been compiled into software called Sepsis ImmunoScore, digital diagnostic software for medical devices, which runs on the company’s ImmunoScore software platform.
Immunix will use data from electronic medical records to screen patients entering the hospital. According to Reddy, the system orders the Sepsis Immune Score if parameters indicate that the patient is likely to worsen.
“Using all global parameters in combination, digital diagnostics can provide a more accurate diagnosis of sepsis,” he said.
The company hopes to obtain FDA clearance for the tool by the end of this year.
Julia Monfrini Peev, founder and managing partner of PACE Healthcare Capital, said in a statement: “Prenosis takes our understanding of disease patterns to a whole new level and enables physicians to make better decisions for their patients faster. Good decision.”
Hospitals have been adopting technology to alert providers to patients at risk for sepsis.For example, electronic health records company Epic Systems developed the Epic sepsis model, and startups such as Bayesian are also looking to use AI to treat sepsis patients faster than usual.
In general, Prenosis’s competitors are either diagnostic companies or clinical decision support companies, Reddy wrote. Prenosis is combining the two approaches to create some GPS systems for acute care conditions.
“Ultimately, this data will help us move from telling patients when they are sick to an era where we can diagnose patients before they get sick,” Reddy wrote.
PACE’s investment builds on other partnerships that Prenosis has recently formed. For example, in November, the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, part of the U.S. Department of Defense, Awarded to the company up to $4.3 million to develop a point-of-care system for early detection of sepsis in the field. Prenosis is working with manufacturer Foxconn to mass-produce equipment for the system, called Immunix Emergency Point-of-Care.
Prenosis is also working on solutions for other acute diseases, including acute kidney injury, heart failure and stroke, Reddy wrote. The company has 15 full-time employees and about 30 other consultants, part-time employees and consultants.
