Remote-monitoring and decision-support startup Biofourmis is set to acquire Takeda Pharmaceuticals’ Gaido Health, an oncology-focused digital tool, for an undisclosed sum. The new cash deal is expected to help Biofourmis further its foothold on the oncology space.
“When we started Biofourmis, our primary focus was cardiovascular disease. The goal from the beginning was to continue to expand our digital therapeutics portfolio to include other therapeutic areas such as oncology and pain where our wearable technology, remote monitoring and AI-based predictive analytics could most benefit patients and providers,” Kuldeep Singh Rajput, CEO of Biofourmis, wrote in an email to MobiHealthNews. “For oncology in particular, our digital therapeutics enable powerful software-based therapeutic interventions that keep patients out of the emergency department and the hospital following treatments such as chemotherapy and radiation.”
Gaido originated as part of Takeda Digital Ventures. Now the plan is to combine Gaido with Biofourmis’ Biovitals platform. Gaido’s tool is able to combine remote monitoring, patient surveys and analytics in order to monitor cancer patients at home and detect possible signs of complications. Gaido has been used in clinical trials so far, but this new integration will be the first time the tool is commercially available.
By combining the two tools, Rajput said that the result will be a quicker go-to-market strategy.
“Time to market is critical, and by acquiring Gaido Health, we will be able to combine its tested clinical algorithms with the FDA-cleared Biofourmis Biovitals platform and go to market right away rather than the one to two years it would take to develop and validate an oncology solution ourselves,” he said.
WHY IT MATTERS
The company is pitching this new integration as a way to keep patients out of the hospital and reduce cost.
“While there are other remote monitoring solutions on the market that can be used for oncology, they tend to be very symptom related and require a lot of symptom reporting by patients,” he said. “This also means they are reactive rather than proactive – they treat symptoms that have already happened rather than preventing them from occurring. The combined Biofourmis and Gaido Health solution is predictive, instead of reactive: It passively captures data via wearable sensors, combining that with data from a patient-facing app, and applying AI-based advanced analytics to be predictive and intervene early for improved outcomes.”
THE LARGER TREND
The startup was founded in Singapore about four years ago, but moved to Boston in the spring of 2019.
Though a fairly young company, this isn’t Biofourmis’s first acquisition in recent years. Last November it purchased the Zürich-based wearable biosensor company Biovotion. Also in the fall it acquired Indian company Hastagg, which focuses on software and IT.
The company has a history of working with big pharma. At the same time Biofourmis announced its Biovotion deal, it unveiled that it had inked a commercialization deal with Novartis on a platform that uses predictive analytics to manage heart failure in patient populations. The technology uses Biofourmis’s AI and its Everion sensor (which it had originally acquired from Biovotion).
ON THE RECORD
“Our solution will enable providers to monitor patients closely at home post therapy, and to collect biometric data from wearable sensors along with patient-reported data from a patient-facing app,” Rajput wrote. “That way, any signals tied to complications associated with the cancer or related treatments, such as sepsis or other infections, can be flagged early and clinicians will have the actionable information they need to intervene early to prevent a medical crisis and improve outcomes.”
