Hey! We’re two high school students geared towards improving global healthcare through the project title, Helio. We want to apply point of care monitoring in healthcare in ways the world has never seen before.
What we’ve been doing so far…
After hearing about lupus and all of its complications, we looked into three main problems: lupus delayed diagnosis, lupus treatment efficiency and lupus flare prediction. Along the way, we connected with dozens of rheumatologists and patients to hear their thoughts and learn more about the disease.
However, after months of research, analysis and failure, we saw that there was no pre-existing research to validate the potential success of any of our solutions, or that they would solve the root cause of the problems. The only way to validate these hypotheses would be to conduct a long-term study.
Funding the studies would be difficult, putting us in a constant loop of trying to get funding with no validation. Applying biosensors was also our main goal, and adding a long-term study would have added 5+ years before we started developing the biosensor.
Additionally, for many of the problems, we identified in lupus, using a biosensor to solve it wouldn’t have made sense.
But, we're not completely abandoning all hopes of helping lupus patients. We're putting lupus on the back-burner for now to figure out a more feasible area that could be achieved within the next year.
Ideas where we hit a dead-end + primary reason
Frequent monitoring of biomarkers to increase the speed of diagnosis:
Because there is no universal test for lupus, potential lupus cases are brushed off when doctors cannot see the full picture. The biggest challenge is diagnosing patients who have slow prognosis, where vital indicators to lupus don’t show up for years. In this case, the increased frequency of biomarker monitoring is redundant. The only way to detect lupus faster would be to first find a highly specific biomarker that is produced in the earliest stages of the disease, however that biomarker has not yet been discovered and would require us to conduct a long-term research study.
POC monitoring to track the efficacy of treatment through biomarkers:
All lupus drugs take 2+ months to settle in, and the current frequency that lupus patients are getting bloodwork (4-12 times per year) is sufficient to track the effectiveness of their lupus treatment. Additionally, it’s equally as important to take into account side effects, the specific area of damage, and patient preferences. Our biosensor would be incapable of measuring every single aspect simultaneously.
Continuous at-home monitoring of disease activity to predict flares:
If a flare were predicted, often nothing can be done because of the extreme adverse effects of corticosteroids, which are prescribed to suppress flares immediately. For those who flare frequently, it is lethal to often increase the dosages of these corticosteroids. There is also no research suggesting flares can be predicted months in advance, and even if they could, there is no research stating that increasing dosages of other immunosuppressant drugs months in advance can suppress future flares.
The only way to find an incentive for a flare prediction system is either developing a completely non-detrimental treatment that can quickly suppress flares, which is out of our scope, or conducting a long-term study exploring how avoiding their lupus triggers can reduce the impact of future flares and to what degree.
The challenges in monitoring lupus biomarkers via POC biosensors:
Each lupus patient carries unique disease pathways that behave differently and must all be assessed. Our greatest challenge is finding a biosensor that can monitor all these various disease pathways at once with a high degree of accuracy. We would also have to design a specific system of detection for at least seven different biomarkers, which would be years of trial and error.
Main Takeaways
Cutting straight to the chase, we hit a temporary dead end, and we’ve learned way too much in getting there.
Exhaust asking “Why?”
The reason we came to these conclusions was through months of speaking to rheumatologists and reading every research paper off the internet. We wanted to figure out why lupus patients are still suffering, and find opportunities for improvement. We have no regrets in turning to a different focus because we’ve figured out the limits in lupus and our wants. From here, we know moving to stage two will be a much quicker process.
Don’t get too attached to your ideas:
Much of the reason why we continued to ask “why” until we hit a wall was because we got a bit too attached to the idea of working with lupus. While it was good that we continued to question everything, we missed the turning point, and we used up a considerable amount of time on things that probably wouldn’t get us much further. Finding this turning point is always hard - you'll always feel like you missed something - but it’s important to listen to your gut.
What we’ve been exploring…
Our main goal is to work with biosensors and at-home health monitoring. We want to look into an area where there’s a huge outcome - predicting an attack, allowing for better personalization of treatment, or for a better understanding of how certain activities may affect a person’s condition.
We have three main routes: look into a specific area of SLE( since starting off with a systemic disease as a whole isn’t the best idea), look into other autoimmune diseases, or start fresh.
Our current focus is in predicting unexpected panic attacks through a wearable biosensor. Research indicates there are signs that can be shown up to an hour in advance, and immediate treatment isn’t as harmful as those used to suppress lupus flares.
Advice, resources, and connecting
If you’d like to further discuss some of our topics or ideas, feel free to schedule a meeting with us or shoot us an email! Everything we mentioned is a more simplified version of the bigger picture. We would love to hear your thoughts.