Deal highlights 

• Smart, at-home blood testing device with several disease specific test cartridges 
• Y Combinator company that has raised $1M from leading Silicon Valley investors
• Leadership team of strong technical founders and CEO and CMO with 30+ years of experience and multiple exits of eight- and nine-figures in the diagnostics industry
• 4 patents and 3 peer-reviewed publications covering the core technology
• $400k in contracts with multiple high impact U.S. government agencies and a top 5 global pharma company
• Initial focus in the $3B+ cardiac diagnostics market segment with plans to expand into the broader $50B+ lab testing and patient monitoring markets

The Problem

Healthcare is broken.

Historically, hospitals have been financially incentivized to treat you, not to keep you healthy and out of the doctor’s office. This has resulted in skyrocketing costs and a revolving door experience for patients. In most hospitals, heart failure patients face over 20% readmission rate within thirty days of discharge. Recent legislation has started an industry wide shift from reactive care to proactive care. Insurance companies are now penalizing hospitals for high readmit rates and poor outcomes.

To adapt to this paradigm shift, healthcare providers are turning to new care coordination protocols and patient monitoring technologies to improve the management of complex chronic diseases.

Unfortunately, current tools either lack sensitivity and specificity (e.g., apps and wearables) or are expensive and invasive (e.g., implantable devices) leaving a gap in remote monitoring technologies – until now.

Our Solution

Generating more high resolution snapshots of your health

InnaMed is developing a smart, at-home blood testing device called TeleLab for remotely monitoring patients. Serial and frequent blood testing is a foundation of outpatient care as over 70% of clinical decisions require blood tests.

Today only a small portion of blood testing may be performed at home, such as painful finger stick glucose testing. The bulk of blood testing is performed at outpatient labs, requiring patient willingness, effort, time and money as patients must travel, wait and rely on caregiver support in order to comply with the recommended follow-ups. 

The vision for TeleLab is to deliver clinical value by eliminating the barriers to blood testing, thereby shifting more outpatient care to the home setting and enabling more frequent appraisal of patient health.

How it works

By combining microneedle blood collection, patented electrochemical blood analysis technology and cloud-computing, InnaMed will provide laboratory-level blood testing at the home setting and share the results with your physician for assessment.

It is simple to use: 

1. Place cartridge on your upper arm

2. Push button for painless blood draw

3. Insert cartridge into TeleLab reader

The technology inside

InnaMed’s intellectual property encompasses reagents, molecular detection mechanisms and data analysis methods. Our work has been published in several industry leading peer-reviewed journals. Following painless microneedle extraction of capillary blood into the microfluidic cartridge, the following patented technologies are used to quantify molecules in the sample.

Electrochemical Proximity Assay 

Method for detecting proteins in blood

Demonstrated a limited detection of 128 femtomolar for measuring insulin (superior to current ELISA tests)

Electrochemical Nanostructure Assay

This is our proprietary method for detecting small molecules in blood - most small molecule tests require the use of mass spec which is extremely resource intensive

Differential Circuit for Electrochemical Measurements 

Method for reducing noise in electrochemical data

~4x noise reduction using ~$100 hardware enabling affordable home testing with clinical accuracy

The First Market

Heart failure

Our first market segment is focused on patients with heart failure. Heart failure is a chronic disease affecting approximately 6 million people in the U.S. in which the heart muscle progressively weakens and cannot sufficiently circulate blood throughout the body. As one of the leading causes of hospitalization in the US in patients over the age of 60, heart failure is becoming a growing public health concern with the aging US population.

The most frightening symptom of heart failure is shortness of breath. Patients are unable to breathe comfortably and as a result rush to the ER in fear of imminent death. These visits are not only traumatizing for the patient but are also expensive, each admission costing upwards of $13,000. Hospitals are also penalized by Medicare for high readmission rates.

Currently, almost all aspects of heart failure management from data collection to analysis, decision making, and communication are performed manually, resulting in high resource utilization, bottlenecks to treatment and suboptimal outcomes. Our technology is well-positioned to fill this market need as current solutions don’t meet the clinical need. 

Our first disposable test cartridge: TeleKidney (HF)

Creatinine | Blood Urea Nitrogen | Sodium | Potassium

Physicians have long used this panel of tests to assess a heart failure patient's renal and electrolyte status to determine the safety of starting or changing a course of therapy. 

Frequent, at-home testing enables more frequent and personalized modulation of dosage while maintaining safety as shown by the Home Diuretic Protocol study.

Our second disposable test cartridge: TeleHeart (HF)

NT-proBNP | Hematocrit | Hemoglobin | Other Proteins (stealth)

Physicians have long used NT-proBNP to detect a patient’s worsening heart failure prior to starting them on a new therapy or changing the dosage of their current therapy.

Our panel expands on this test, including other markers that can improve the sensitivity and specificity with which heart failure is detected, allowing for earlier clinical action.

Future pipeline applications

The initial cardiac diagnostics and patient monitoring market is $3B+. InnaMed plans to expand into the $50B+ outpatient blood testing market. These markets are growing rapidly as the population ages, creating a significant market opportunity for InnaMed. 

The Business Model

We plan to initially sell our products directly to hospitals, nursing facilities and cardiology and heart failure clinics for in-office and at-home patient monitoring use. In-office use will be priced on a per unit and per cartridge basis (razor/razor-blade model). At-home patient monitoring use will be priced based on a subscription model (hardware as a service model). Simultaneously, we plan to work with insurance companies to establish exclusive reimbursement plans for the use of our product allowing for more rapid hospital and clinic adoption and higher margins.

Current Traction

InnaMed has already secured eight letters of intent (LOIs) from leading hospital systems (listed below) that are looking to purchase the product post-FDA clearance, with several other institutions expressing strong verbal commitments:

• Florida Hospital

• Valley Health System

• Penn State Heart and Vascular Center

• NorthBay Cardiology

• Bridgeport Hospital

• Arkansas Heart Hospital

• Monida Healthcare Network

• Hahnemann University Hospital

Prior to FDA clearance, InnaMed plans to partner with pharmaceutical companies and government agencies that are interested in using its products for clinical research studies. InnaMed is currently partnering through technology development contracts with multiple high-impact U.S. government agencies and a top 5 global pharmaceutical company. InnaMed currently has $400K in milestone-based contracts with a rapidly growing pipeline of potential partners.

Fundraising

InnaMed has raised over $1M to date and is a Y Combinator W17 alum. Notable investors include:

What's Next

What's been done

What will be done

Executive Team

Acting* means engaged in that capacity, but not yet formally appointed to the position by the Company and its Directors

Advisory Board

Employees

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