Bedsores are a nasty business. Commonplace among patients with limited mobility, they can lead to horrid complications like sepsis, cellulitis and even cancer. And they are notoriously difficult to detect when they’re in their earliest stages.
Pittsburgh startup Rubitection is developing a diagnostic tool to do exactly that – detect the early onset of a bedsore, so that treatment can begin as quickly as possible.
Rubitection has raised about $300,000 in SBIR phase 1 and angel funding, though CEO Sanna Gaspard is feeling around for investors to participate in a Series A round she hopes to open up early next year. The company is attempting to start up its first clinical pilot, and is looking for long-term care facilities to participate.
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Rubitection is a finalist in MassChallenge, and Gaspard has parked herself in Boston through October, working with the global incubator. This is the company’s elevator pitch:
In 1995 Christopher Reeves, superman, died from a bedsore. Christopher Reeves’ story highlights the difficulty with the prevention, detection, and treatment of bedsores. The Rubitect Assessment System (RAS) provides reliable early bedsore detection to improve patient care. The RAS’ low risk FDA pathway allows rapid penetration of a $2.9 billion US market. Rubitection aims to grow into a highly profitable business within 5-6 years to exit to large medical device company to yield excellent returns.
Gaspard developed the concept during her doctoral work at Carnegie Mellon University. Here’s why:
Each year, more than 2.5 million Americans develop bedsores, also called pressure ulcers, according to the government’s Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. Some 60,000 of these people die each year from bedsore-related complications. For an individual patient, this can add $43,000 extra to treatment costs. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid actually considered later-stage pressure ulcers as “never events” – meaning they will not pay the extra costs of treating patients with this condition, as they are preventable and shouldn’t occur.
But diagnostic criteria for bedsores are pretty subjective – physicians rely on a “blanch test” to determine whether tissue is headed toward ulceration. Blanch tests involve pressing the skin to see if it’ll leave a discolored mark when the blood leaches out – and if it doesn’t, the patient’s a likely candidate for a bedsore. But the accuracy of this test is dependent on a patient’s coloring and the lighting in the testing room, Gaspard said, which allows many bedsores to go unnoticed.
“We would allow a caregiver or nurse to basically do the detection objectively, so they can track the changes in health over time,” Gaspard said.
