One of Greater Cincinnati’s most promising startups has announced a new strategic collaboration with a relatively new San Francisco Bay organization that bills itself as an innovation and investment hub.
Sense Neuro Diagnostics, a medical tech company developing devices to improve outcomes for stroke and brain injury patients, is partnering with Inflect Health. As part of the relationship, Inflect Health will provide Sense access to its network of frontline physicians and health care experts and offer guidance on market development, commercial awareness and go-to-market strategy.
Inflect Health, which spun off from Vituity, a physician-owned company, in December, offers a network of 3,000 physicians, 2,000 advanced providers, 1,500 scribes and more than 300 hospitals. The level and amount of insights provided would be invaluable for an early-stage startup like Sense as it advances toward market entry.
“We are excited to collaborate with the team at Inflect Health who share our vision for improving patient outcomes,” Geoff Klass, CEO of Sense Neuro Diagnostics, said in a release.
Sense Neuro Diagnostics was founded in 2014 by four University of Cincinnati physicians to improve outcomes for stroke and brain injury patients. The company, which is headquartered at HCDC in Norwood, is developing two devices: Non-invasive, wearable brain scanners to assess and monitor a patient's neurological status in real time.
Its novel technology enables rapid detection of traumatic brain injury and can differentiate between three different stroke subtypes, both in a pre-hospital and hospital setting. Sense, in the first quarter of 2021, initiated a multicenter pivotal trial to evaluate its device, considered the last step before FDA submission for approval for commercialization. Up to 400 patients will be enrolled at sites across the U.S., Canada and India.
Each year nearly 800,000 people suffer strokes in the U.S., and 1.7 million Americans suffer traumatic brain injury. There is currently no objective way to detect brain injury and stroke subtype in a field environment, or to non-invasively and continuously monitor brain injury for expanded hemorrhage in the hospital, the company said.
Andrew Smith, president of Inflect Health and chief operations and innovation officer for Vituity, said Sense Neuro Diagnostics is “addressing a critical need” through its innovation. While a number of companies in the health care space are focused on stroke and brain injury patients, Sense’s approach to the science is unique, Inflect Health wrote in a blog post.
“We are pleased to partner with Sense on a range of possible market applications for this promising technology,” Smith said in the release.
