INNOVATION SHOWCASE
INNOVATORS AT THE FOREFRONT: FIGHTING COVID-19 AND CANCER By Neil Greenberg
David Ormesher, founder and CEO of closerlook
Innovation within life sciences has never been more critical. While many of the leading global biopharma companies race to develop a new vaccine to fight Covid-19, numerous promising new products are coming out of the labs of early-stage health and technology companies to attack the pandemic along with its debilitating impact on chronic diseases. With the help of David Ormesher, founder and CEO of closerlook, here is a selection of ones that we have identified.
PHYSIQ: REMOTE PATIENT MONITORING AND EARLY ALERTS PhysIQ has made its wearable biosensor product, pinpointIQ™, pandemic-ready. With pinpointIQ, providers can track and monitor patients continuously, whether they’ve been quarantined or sent home to recover after a hospital stay. The AI-powered analytics can detect meaningful changes in a patient’s underlying condition even before symptoms are manifested. Their proprietary analytics are FDA cleared and are currently being utilized by the Department of Defense (DOD) and the Henry M. Jackson Foundation for the Advancement of Military Medicine to evaluate advanced technologies for disease outbreak preparedness. PhysIQ’s analytics has the capability to characGary Conkright, CEO of PhysIQ terize immune response to infection, evaluate novel diagnostic and prognostic tools, and investigate the efficacy of investigational drug therapies that may be administered to enrolled participants. “It is becoming more obvious that we need to deliver Covid-19 care in the home since hospital capacity cannot keep up with the fallout of this devastating virus,” says Gary Conkright, CEO of PhysIQ. “Achieving this will require clinical and physiological insight traditionally not available in an outpatient environment or with periodic spot checks of vitals that appear to be lagging indicators with this virus.” Given the nature of the continuous data collection within the pinpointIQ™ platform, study clinicians will have rapid access to streaming data and analytics to monitor individuals with confirmed cases or to decide if those who have been exposed should continue to self-isolate at home or require hospitalization. PhysIQ’s remote monitoring technology was first tested during the Ebola crisis in 2014. The wearable clinicalgrade biosensor is the size of large bandage and tracks and uploads continuous data, such as heart rate, blood pressure, respiration, and temperature to the cloud-based analytics engine for processing of the raw vital sign data. Contact: gconkright@physiq.com 51 | HS&M JULY/AUGUST 2020
