Introducing the next generation of at-home diagnostics - where both tests and results are performed in real-time and from the patient's home. We're revolutionizing decentralized care, starting with tailored biosensors for Chronic Kidney Disease.
#medtech #diagnostics #nanotechnology #biotech #electronics #UCBerkeley #CambridgeUniversity #EUHorizon #patentedtechnology
Gisens Biotech is a company in the healthcare diagnostics space, leveraging nanotechnology and electronics to bring laboratory testing outside of the lab and closer to patients. The company has created a portable diagnostics device capable of delivering lab-quality testing, from within the patient’s home, with results and insights that seamlessly integrate into electronic health records with no user input from either patient or caregiver.
The company is therefore targeting a rapidly expanding market in healthcare where consumerization, transparency and patient-centrism are driving decision-making for patients, payers, and providers at the same time.
The company is leveraging a unique expertise of the technical founding team, the ability to chemically modify semiconductor materials – at the core of all modern electronics – to link them with biological elements (e.g antibodies, aptamers, CRISPR-Cas, etc) thus creating hybrid bioelectronic microchips (biochips) that respond to chemical and biological reactions, and translate those into electronic signals.
Over the past 3 years the company demonstrated the technical feasibility and versatility of their technology by creating high performance prototype devices to test for inflammation markers, COVID-19, and kidney disease. The results were published in different high impact peer-reviewed publications and gave rise to the company’s core IP. Gisens raised over 600k USD in a pre-seed round, with investors like Berkeley’s Skydeck Fund, and Techstars. Recently the company was awarded a Horizon project from the EU for 1.4MM Euros to develop a microchip for the detection of lung cancer in breath samples.
The healthcare market we know is undergoing a critical transformation driven by 5 major market forces: 1) a severe shortage of healthcare professionals (by the year 2036 the US will be 86,000 physicians short), 2) an aging population suffering from multiple chronic conditions (over 50% of the American population suffers from at least 1 chronic condition, 3) a strong consumer demand for remote and digitally enabled medical services, where over 46% of patients in 2024 engage with their caregivers both digitally and in person, 4) a growing number of physicians demanding new digitally enabled remote monitoring tools that could improve and streamline care, with over 53% of doctors being enthusiastic about remote monitoring according to a recent AMA study, and 5) providers realizing that moving care from the hospital to the home, lowers significantly costs without compromising on quality, with major players such as Mass General Brigham looking to move at least 10% of their patients to remote care by the end of 2025.
These market forces have given rise to an opportunity for technologies that allow for remote patient monitoring and diagnostics, that are robust enough to have clinical value, and at the same time seamlessly integrate into the patient’s electronic records.
According to reports from Abbott Laboratories, the market for at home diagnostics is expected to grow at a CAGR of 12.4% YoY, and McKinsey is forecasting that over 250bn USD worth of care services will move from the facility and into the home by end of 2025. In their most recent report BCG shared that “Wearable and at-home smart medical devices will become increasingly prevalent, particularly for managing chronic conditions and postoperative care” and “telehealth will offer not only virtual consultations but also remote diagnostics, and may include the use of AI to analyze symptoms and enable at-home lab tests and the real-time monitoring of vital signs”.
As AI becomes more powerful, these systems will need to consume sizeable amounts of accurate data to predict complications and generate reliable recommendations, Gisens Biotech is gathering biological and biomedical data through its hardware to unlock a new generation of data driven medicine.
Gisens Biotech has designed a portable diagnostic device where user experience is at the forefront. The company created a testing cartridge called G-LoC (graphene lab-on-a-chip) that is plugged into a handheld reader that will run the test itself, and transmit the results to a mobile app installed in the patient’s smartphone.
The company is going after the Chronic Kidney Disease target market, representing roughly [37MM Americans](https://www.cdc.gov/kidney-disease/php/data-research/index.html#:~:text=Fast stats,are estimated to have CKD.&text=As many as 9 in,not know they have CKD.), of which over 800,000 are critically ill and require multiple tests weekly. These patients instead of driving to a centralized laboratory, like LabCorp or Quest Diagnostics, to get a blood draw, they can collect a saliva sample at home and run the 4 most critical lab tests for kidney disease monitoring in the device, using the G-LoC cartridge to obtain those 4 results from a single sample.