May 17 2016
Profusa, Inc. announced today that it was selected by Pioneers, the global business relationship builder, to showcase the company's "wear-and-forget" Lumee™ biosensor technology at the Pioneers Festival held at the prestigious Hofburg Imperial Palace in Vienna, Austria, May 24th-25th.
Making health and disease monitoring as easy as turning on your smart phone, the company's tissue-integrated sensors for long-term, continuous tracking of body chemistry will be highlighted by Ben Hwang, Profusa's chairman and chief executive officer, in a talk entitled, "Beyond Fitness Trackers: Let Your Body Speak."
In a recent TEDX Vienna interview, Hwang explained how the company's tiny injectable sensors may soon enable real-time detection of our body's unique chemistry, providing actionable, clinical-grade data for personal and medical use. This capability to provide a continuous stream of live data could have the power to revolutionize the relationship we have with our bodies.
"Most of us only get a once-a-year peek at what's happening inside our body when we visit our doctor," said Hwang. "Yet the most valuable and important information comes from having a 'conversation' with your body in order to make timely choices and action corrections when your body data is available in real time and when it matters. What this technology will mean is that the entire spectrum of stakeholders in the health care system will fundamentally alter the way they do things."
Tissue-integrating Biosensors
With grant support by DARPA, the National Institutes of Health, and other funding agencies, Profusa's technology and novel bioengineering approach overcomes the effects of the largest hurdle in long-term use of biosensors in the body: the foreign body response. Placed under the skin with a specially designed injector, each tiny biosensor is a flexible fiber, 3-to-5 mm long and approximately 500 microns in diameter. Rather than being isolated from the body, Profusa's biosensors work fully integrated within the body's tissue — without any metal device or electronics — overcoming the effects of the foreign body response for more than one year.
Each biosensor is comprised of a bioengineered "smart hydrogel" (similar to contact lens material) forming a porous, tissue-integrating scaffold that induces capillary and cellular in-growth from surrounding tissue. The smart gel is linked to a light-emitting molecule that continuously signals the presence of a body chemical such as oxygen, glucose, or other biomarker.
Optical Reader
Adhered to the skin's surface or held by hand, a separate optical reader is used to read the fluorescent signal from the embedded biosensor. The reader sends excitation signals through the skin to the biosensor, which then emits fluorescent light proportional to the concentration of molecules of interest. The data is relayed to a smart phone for an encrypted personal record and historical tracking. Data can be shared securely via HIPAA-compliant digital networks with healthcare providers.
Lumee Oxygen Sensing System™
Profusa's first medical product, the Lumee Oxygen Sensing System, is a single-biomarker sensor designed to measure dissolved oxygen in the tissue. The system is being commercialized as the only long-term monitoring technology that guides therapeutic action and measures tissue oxygen levels during the treatment and healing process for peripheral artery disease (PAD). Pending CE Mark, the Lumee system is slated to be available in Europe in 2016 for use by vascular surgeons and wound-healing specialists.
PAD affects 202 million people worldwide, 27 million of whom live in Europe and North America, with an annual economic burden of more than $74 billion in the U.S. alone. As the disease advances, patients can experience significant leg pain with impaired mobility (claudication), and in its most severe form, critical limb ischemia (CLI), gangrene and limb amputation.
Source: http://profusa.com/