Prenosis has added a new investor as the precision medicine firm works toward regulatory approval for technology designed to give early warning of patients at risk of developing sepsis.
The new investor, PACE Healthcare Capital, brings the Chicago-based company’s fundraising total to more than $20 million. Prenosis did not disclose PACE’s investment or its other investors.
Like other startups, Prenosis is tapping into the power of artificial intelligence to develop a better picture of how diseases develop in patients. For Prenosis, the initial focus is sepsis, a life-threatening response to infection that kills 350,000 people each year in the U.S. and 11 million people around the world.
Standard tests for sepsis are inaccurate and can lead to delays in treatment, which increases 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 cell count, Reddy wrote. Prenosis has built biological and clinical datasets to better understand sepsis. The data has been woven into a software-as-a-medical device digital diagnostic called the Sepsis ImmunoScore, which runs on the company’s Immunix software platform.
Immunix would screen patients coming into a hospital using data from electronic medical records. If parameters suggest a patient is likely to deteriorate, the system orders the Sepsis ImmunoScore, according to Reddy.
“Using all of the holistic parameters together, the digital diagnostic then provides a much more accurate diagnosis for sepsis,” he said.
The company is hoping to obtain clearance for the tool from the Food and Drug Administration by the end of this year.
“Prenosis brings our understanding of the disease patterns to a whole new level and enables physicians to make better decisions faster for their patients,” Julia Monfrini Peev, founder and managing partner of PACE Healthcare Capital, said in a statement.
Hospitals have been adopting technology that alerts providers to patients at risk of sepsis. Electronic health records company Epic Systems has developed the Epic Sepsis Model, for example and startups like Bayesian are also looking to leverage AI to treat sepsis patients faster than usual.
In general, competitors to Prenosis are either diagnostics companies or clinical decision support companies, Reddy wrote. Prenosis is combining both approaches to create something of a GPS system for acute care conditions.
“Eventually, the data will help us move from telling patients when they are sick and enter an era in which we can diagnose patients before they get sick,” Reddy wrote.
The investment from PACE builds on other recent partnerships formed by Prenosis. In November, for example, the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, an arm of the U.S. Department of Defense, awarded the company up to $4.3 million toward development of a point-of-care system for the early detection of sepsis in the field. Prenosis is collaborating with manufacturer Foxconn on mass producing devices used in the system, called Immunix Emergency Point-of-Care.
Prenosis also is working on solutions for other acute conditions, 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 advisers.
