KidneyIntelX, the company’s lead diagnostic product, addresses diabetic kidney disease - one of the world’s most common and costly chronic medical conditions. Globally, an estimated 850m people have kidney disease, which kills more people annually than breast or prostate cancer.1
From a standard blood draw and analysis of electronic health record data points, the AI-enabled KidneyIntelX allows the accurate calculation of a patient’s risk of experiencing rapid kidney function decline and kidney failure. To date, it has been difficult to identify which patients are at most risk; close to half of the patients put on costly dialysis have never seen a specialist doctor.
"Currently available diagnostics do a relatively poor job of discriminating early on who has kidney disease that should be aggressively treated," says James McCullough, CEO of RenalytixAI and a veteran of the medical diagnostics market.
"Kidney disease is a silent killer," says Dr. Steven Coca, a senior nephrologist at the Mount Sinai Health System in New York and a co-founder of RenalytixAI. "Most people don’t show up with symptoms until kidney function is very low and it is too late to apply treatments to change the trajectory of their kidney disease."
A venture incubated out of UK diagnostics firm EKF Diagnostics (AIM: EKF), RenalytixAI is building KidneyIntelX as a platform integrated with healthcare systems such as Mount Sinai that can be expanded to continuously analyse further information from electronic health records, predictive blood-based biomarkers and other genomic data. "The power of machine learning allows us to continuously improve performance and begin to look at the subtleties of the disease through the course of treatment and changes in patient behaviour," says McCullough.