10.2021-Sense.nano-Ian-Butterworth

IAN BUTTERWORTH: Hello. My name's Ian Butterworth. I'm a co-founder and CTO of Leuko. And I'd like to tell you about our non-invasive, at-home white blood cell monitoring.

So every year in the US there are 850,000 chemotherapy patients. 140,000 of those will be hospitalized due to infection costing a $4 billion economic burden and 10,000 deaths. The problem is that chemotherapy causes low white blood cell levels, and low white blood cell levels causes life-threatening infections.

But, currently, there's no way to screen for low white blood cell levels in the home. The only thing that can be done is to take a thermometer and identify when infection has already occurred. Blood draws are taken to monitor white blood cell levels, but they're only done in the clinic. The problem is that no existing method for monitoring white blood cell levels is good enough for the home setting for routine use by home outpatients.

So the solution that we are developing is based on looking into the finger, the region around the nail called the nail fold, where if you look at the capillaries in this region with microscopy you can actually see bright spots flowing through the capillaries as blood flows. And those bright spots are white blood cells.

Now, we developed this initial proof of concept at MIT and demonstrated and published the initial proof of concept with a manual prototype. But since then, we've been working on an automatic device for use in the home towards the product.

And this is PointCheck. So PointCheck is a device that can be taken home by the outpatient. It's non-invasive. It provides rapid results, and it's connected back to the care team to allow earlier intervention. And the idea is that this would be used every day during the gap between cycles.

So instead of this risk being unknown, we will be able to flag when risk is elevated, enabling clinicians to do things such as provide prescribed prophylactic antibiotics, or tailor the chemotherapy dosing, and, ultimately, have better outcomes. And we have key clinical support with our work and the product being validated with many key opinion leaders.

And what's been key for us is developing our product through iterative studies, one of which is with the MIT's Center of Clinical and Translational Research where we've been doing short burst iterative studies on-- to improve the usability and the precision of the device across many subjects. We're about 50% way through recruited, and I'd love to invite people to participate in our study. If you scan the QR code in the top right-hand corner, that will take you to a sign up form. Please ask any interested parties to do so. Thank you. And if you do that, you're going to help us get towards scrubbing out these life-threatening infections.

So I'm Ian. This has been Leuko and the PointCheck. And thank you very much for your time.