Our story at Kalium Health is remarkable. We spotted an emerging, and accelerating, need for a more personalised approach to kidney disease management in 2018. Since then we have built an expert team of scientists and developed health monitoring products that are poised to transform the way that chronic disease is managed. We have been joined on this mission by investors, researchers and partners and are now entering a new, exciting stage of our growth.
Progress recognised with prestigious award nominations
Our short history has already been punctuated with several prestigious awards and nominations, from Cofinitive #21toWatch, to Cambridge Independent and Business Weekly. Awards are an important marker of how far we have come and recognition of our potential, so we are thrilled to announce that we have also recently been shortlisted for the Best Early Stage MedTech Company award by OBN, an acknowledgment of our relentless pursuit of excellence in the increasingly important field of remote patient monitoring.
The OBN Awards, now in their 15th year, are a highly regarded and sought-after awards programme for the Life Sciences industry, designed to celebrate innovation and outstanding achievement across all corners of the industry. The awards recognise inspirational leadership, exciting innovation, novel and exciting approaches to unmet clinical needs, outstanding company progression and the delivery of real-life, tangible results.
Our mission is to transform chronic disease management
Kalium aims to empower patients and physicians to improve health with real-time electrolyte data. Blood electrolyte balance is critical to health, however, in kidney disease or heart failure, levels of electrolytes such as potassium can become dangerous. Common medications, such as blood pressure tablets, often make the problem worse.
Remote monitoring of electrolyte levels is essential to deliver lifesaving, personalised care and enable new therapies for millions of people. The first product we are working to commercialise is the Kalium personalised potassium monitor. This is simple and easy for clinicians and patients to use and provides an accurate, rapid readout of potassium levels.
The benefits are huge: no more delays in accessing important test results; reduced need for venous blood draws; and – crucially – a patient-centric approach that combines digital data and smart analytics to deliver personalised health insights to help improve health, diet and lifestyle.
Chronic disease management is ripe for change
We have attracted so much attention in recent years because we are innovating in a field that has remained static for many years. Traditional methods of potassium monitoring have relied on cumbersome, centralised laboratory tests that often led to delays in diagnosis and treatment. These conventional approaches have failed to meet the evolving needs of patients and healthcare systems, causing frustration and inefficiencies along the patient pathway.
Existing methods are hard to access, requiring patients to take time to travel to clinics for fixed appointments. They are invasive, involving a venous blood draw, normally from the arm, and analysis is typically only carried out later that day with results not flowing back to doctors for hours or days and with patients struggling to understand how this impacts their health risk or required changes to what they eat.
Moreover, these methods are associated with high costs and inefficiencies, straining healthcare budgets at a time when value-based care delivery is rising to prominence, particularly within kidney care.
Beginning in 2018 with a specific clinical target, we surveyed the state of the art in hospital-based test technology and challenged ourselves to think about how care would be delivered differently in future. We identified that the ability for a patient to monitor themselves anywhere, at any time, would be critical. This led us to defining key user requirements, including direct but minimally invasive blood sampling; rapid results; and a user experience built around the needs and preferences of patients as well as clinical stakeholders. This allowed us to begin development of the right product, for the right audience, at the right time.
Combining accuracy, reliability and scalability
Many approaches have been trialled over the years, as we summarised in our recent article published by the Royal Society of Chemistry. The key challenge is to provide the necessary accuracy and precision for clinical use – for example, blood potassium levels are normally tightly controlled (by the kidneys) between 3.5 mM and 5.0 mM which means any small changes can be significant and must be detected. Levels of other electrolytes, such as Magnesium and Calcium, are equally challenging to measure but contribute to an important understanding of a patient’s health.
The blood sensor we have developed is unique in that it combines high performance with the ability to be mass-manufactured, resulting in accurate electrolyte monitoring accessible to all, at an unbeatable cost. Our sensing technology builds on years of academic research and advances in diagnostic device engineering and manufacturing and is a potentially transformative solution, which is why judges across different awards have been impressed by our innovation.
Exciting plans for our next stage of growth
MedTech businesses are complex and can seem unnavigable for investors without extensive life science portfolios, but the reason we have been so successful to date is because Kalium’s proposition is so simple. We are targeting a long-standing problem with a novel solution that is accurate, scalable and enhances care pathways to improve patient experience, system efficiency and health outcomes.
Our first product, the Kalium Personalised Potassium Monitor, is progressing rapidly through product development and will soon undergo several rounds of clinical evaluation and pilot programs in the USA and UK as we demonstrate the benefits of our approach to patients, providers and health payers.
The journey from innovation to commercialisation is a collaborative effort. We understand the importance of partnerships, working with the right investors, and building a world-leading team. These elements have been instrumental in our journey so far and we are planning further strategic alliances and partnerships that will help accelerate adoption as we bring our first products into clinical use.
Find out more
If you are interested in keeping up to date with our progress and want to be the first to know when we open our next investment round, you can register for updates at www.kaliumhealth.com/contact.
