On the evening of April 27th, Three Lakes Partners, a private family office and philanthropic venture dedicated to solving Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis(IPF), announced its $1 million IPF Catalyst Challenge at MATTER, Chicago’s healthcare technology incubator. Working with MATTER, IDEO, and Common Pool, Three Lakes Partners designed the largest healthcare challenge in the Midwest, hoping to raise awareness and encourage innovative solutions on IPF.
The Catalyst Challenge falls under Three Lakes Partners’ bigger “Quality of Life” initiative, improving lives of patients and caregivers inflicted by IPF.
“Our job is to identify and connect the key opinion leaders, the investigators, the technologists, the engineers, the patient advocacy groups etc. and connect them in an ecosystem where they can accelerate towards better quality of care, diagnostics and therapeutics,” said Ken Bahk Phd, Managing Director at Three Lakes Partners.
IPF, a type of Pulmonary Fibrosis, can cause difficulty of breathing and ultimately death when lung tissues become scarred and stop pumping oxygen into the bloodstream.
So, what is it like to live with Pulmonary Fibrosis(PF)?
Bill Vick, an IPF survivor and founder of PF Warriors, one of the largest PF support groups in the country, helped the audience experience it live. Vick instructed the audience to hold their noses, put the coffee straws they were given in their mouths and breathe.
After pausing for 11 seconds, Vick continued: “That’s what it’s like to be a PF patient. Every day, every night, every morning.”
Every year, approximately 125,000 people in the U.S. live with IPF and survive on supplementary oxygen. While the disease currently has no cure and kills the same number of people as breast cancer does, few people have heard of it and its diagnosis often come too late for the patients to be helped.
The biggest challenge of IPF is the “Idiopathic” part, which means that the cause of the disease is unknown. Current solutions, from diagnosis of elimination, to FDA-approved medication to lung transplants, are insufficient and come with incredible side effects.
“The average time [that IPF diagnosis takes] is about 26 months and that adds into the mortality rate, which are 50% in two years and 80% in five years,” Bahk said.
Last night, the launch of the Challenge brought the world a step closer to curing IPF.
A panel featuring many experts in IPF and related fields such as bioinformatics, and patient advocacy, highlighted the challenges and opportunities related to this disease.
Ivan Rosas, MD, and Kathy Lindell, PhD, RN, IPF experts at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and University of Pittsburgh respectively, expressed that patients and caregivers struggle not only to identify IPF due to the lack of symptoms but also to manage it due to the complexities in education and oxygen access/delivery.
On the other hand, Atul Butte, MD, PhD, director of the Institute of Computational Health Science at the University of California, San Francisco, outlined the promise of big data in precision medicine and targeting IPF.
“We are gonna have to start thinking about patients not just based on codes that doctors assign...but also based on measurements of [patient DNA and other molecules], future measurements [through home devices and wearables] like how are you breathing, how are you doing at home,” said Butte. “Not just to learn about you but also to learn about others with the same disorders... We need to use this data to figure out what we can do better for you as a patient, for all of us as eventual patients.”
Since IPF is still a relatively unknown disease, it has a lot of potential for innovation and disruption. The Catalyst Challenge seeks to promote the movement of delivering better solutions to IPF patients, whether it is a research study, an app or a startup designing oxygen solutions.
The Challenge will start receiving applications by the end of this summer. Winner of the $1 million grant will be announced by the end of the year.
(Image via Sean Su of CloudSpotter)
