Authors: Aje Al-Awssi, David Nørgaard Essenbæk, Emil Funk Vangsgaard, Endre Lindhardt Garberg, Ignacio Pardo Casado, Jan Weicher, Shivani Pradeep Karnik, Victoria Thusgaard Ruhoff & Vit Zemanek
Abstract
Chronic Inflammatory Diseases (CIDs) are debilitating diseases affecting millions of people worldwide. Optimal treatment requires constant monitoring, but current testing methods are invasive, time-consuming, and costly. CIDosis strives to change this with a non-invasive patch for self-monitoring. Backed by extensive computer modeling, we are developing a biosensor that continuously collects sweat from the skin, and produces a color reflecting the level of inflammation. The biosensor in our patch is based on Saccharomyces cerevisiae cells equipped with interleukin-specific receptors that will associate in the presence of interleukins, resulting in the intracellular complementation of a split protein. A transduction pathway is then triggered, leading to the production of a color, whose intensity is logged by an app and shared with a medical professional. By integrating the wishes of patients living with CIDs, as well as experts within these fields, CIDosis brings a next generation tool for patient empowerment.
General inflammation can greatly fluctuate, and infrequent testing can give a misleading picture of a patient's inflammation status, due to the snapshot nature of these tests. For example, rheumatoid arthritis patients can experience big inflammation changes between current testing, leading to irrevocable damage. We want to avoid this by giving patients easy access to weekly stress-free monitoring. The CIDosis patch can be used in the patient’s daily life and help guide treatment by providing more data to the healthcare professionals.
We envision the use of an app that would enable the users to read the inflammation results in a precise manner. This app will track the inflammation results over time. In this way, inflammation levels can be saved and used for disease progression analysis. Here you see a representation of our app with a color slider that allows the user to save the patch color to their calendar and follow their inflammation.
