Is pain subjective? Does one person feel it the same way as another? In general clinical practice, we don’t really know. Right now, our approach to gauging how much something hurts is rudimentary at best – a 0-10 pain scale.
Philadelphia startup PainQx is developing software that uses EEG measurements to objectively answer the question: How much does it hurt?
“When patients are presenting pain, doctors are left with nothing more than an educated guesstimate,” CEO Frank Minella said. “Inaccurate pain measurement leads to inaccurate pain management.”
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The technology is licensed from the NYU School of Medicine. Thus far, PainQx has raised about $1.3 million, and is looking for a $375,000 angel round – and then a $4.5 million Series A.
Overtreatment and addiction to pain meds are, after all, a prevailing epidemic in the U.S. The estimated costs for this run between $560 billion to $630 billion, according to a book called Pain in America: A Blueprint for Transforming Prevention, Care, Education and Research, which writes:
We found that the annual cost of pain was greater than the annual costs in 2010 dollars of heart disease ($309 billion), cancer ($243 billion), and diabetes ($188 billion) and nearly 30 percent higher than the combined cost of cancer and diabetes.
The perception of all these aches and agony is, after all, “all in your head,” Minella said. It’s all about how the brain reacts to injury.
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Advances in brain mapping is allowing PainQx to study electroactivity data from an EEG headset to map out a patient’s pain reaction. Understanding the pain matrix is already well-documented in literature: Certain regions and subregions of the brain light up with electrical activity when a patient’s in pain, which can be captured by EEG, MRI and PET scans.
For the purposes of a scalable device, EEG is the best approach for gauging pain levels, Minella said.
The ultimate goal of PainQx is to change the standard of care in pain assessment, Minella said. But he’s got an incremental plan to validate his tool and bring it to fruition.
The plan is to start out by working with CROs and pharmaceutical companies for pain management clinical trials. The average pain clinical trial cost, Minella says, is about $105 million – so the use-case of such a device will be to improve data, reduce costs and have a cleaner population of patients.
The idea is to next transition into nursing homes and assisted living centers – to be used among patients whose ability to communicate pain is limited.
The case for payors and providers here is cost reduction (the average cost to treat a chronic or neuropathic pain patient is $19,000 per year), building out objective quality measures and monitoring data. And, of course, the ability to reduce, say, opioid abuse.
“If this goes down properly, it really could become the standard of care,” Minella said.