Alexandre Boulanger is best known for building a self-balancing exoskeleton in Wandercraft. For his next trick, a Paris-based robot entrepreneur is working on a much lighter type of wearable: a wrist-worn patch to monitor chronic kidney disease (CKD). His Metyos, a medical technology startup where Boulanger is his CEO, is a company he co-founded. Co-founded with CTO Olga Chashchina. She has a PhD in biomedical engineering and has developed special expertise in biosensors, which is important to their work here.
Interest in biowearables has exploded in recent years, driven by developments such as the commercialization of continuous glucose monitors (CGMs) for diabetes management. At the same time, rising costs of healthcare delivery are increasing pressure on services to find smarter ways to tackle costly problems such as chronic disease management without compromising quality. Biowearables offer a potential route to help square this circle for a variety of chronic health conditions.
Metyos' goal is to build an arm-worn (semi-invasive) real-time sensing technology similar to that already established for diabetes management, which can also detect chemical changes in body fluids just beneath the skin, but link The focus is on tracking biomarkers that have been identified. For chronic kidney disease. The company hopes to get doctors to prescribe its biowearable products as part of a telemedicine management package for patients, and this approach will help doctors diagnose diseases related to kidney failure and hyperkalemia. This suggests that it may be useful for detecting danger signals remotely.
For patients, the goal is to be able to become more active participants in their care by providing recommendations (e.g., diet) and understanding more about CKD through the app. So the startup is taking a two-pronged approach that aims to provide data-driven insights to both doctors and patients. This seems wise and necessary. If mobile technology has achieved anything, it has given consumers an expectation of access to information and staying informed.
The company says its biowearable monitors ions and minerals that can build up in the bloodstream when kidney function is affected, and sends the data via Bluetooth to an app on a user's smartphone. That's what it means. From there, the technology is designed to relay user data to Metyos' secure servers in the cloud, allowing medical professionals monitoring a patient's condition to access the data and remotely track disease progression. Ru.
Boulanger said the team began developing Metyos in 2021 with the help of a “love fund” and public grants. So far, they have built a prototype of the biowearable and conducted some bench tests.
They just closed a pre-seed round of €2.3 million (approximately $2.5 million) to fund the next stage of development, which will involve conducting clinical trials to further evaluate and refine the technology. Lead investors in the round include Cenitz, Bpifrance and KIMA Ventures.
Boulanger, the medical technology startup, has confirmed that Metyos will not bring its technology to market without regulatory approval, and says it has a goal by the end of 2025. In terms of target markets, the team is focused on Europe, particularly its home base of France. And the United States. According to Boulanger, the focus is generally on markets where reimbursement for remote patient monitoring exists and/or is in development.
How did the serial entrepreneur come up with the idea for this startup? “I gained a lot of weight, so I got interested in nutritional tracking and, by extension, biochemical tracking,” he tells TechCrunch. Ta.
Around the same time, Chashchina, Boulanger's co-founder, was suffering from a chronic health condition. When the two met there, their interests coincided with the idea of building biowearables. “Since she has to draw a lot of blood, she wanted a tool that would help her manage her daily health,” he says. “So we started from a user/patient perspective on biowearables and partnered early with physicians to improve clinical needs.”
The startup's goal is to develop a sensing wearable that can improve health outcomes for CKD patients and economic outcomes for health systems by enabling remote biological monitoring of patients with chronic diseases.
Metyos cites statistics suggesting there are more than 800 million CKD patients worldwide.
“CKD is one of the leading chronic diseases in terms of prevalence, mortality and cost. It is a progressive disease and there is no cure (although many treatments exist for the associated symptoms). “Therefore, slowing or stopping the progression of the disease can be very important for patients,” says Dr. Boulanger. “We believe remote monitoring will allow us to predict adverse events, help clinicians make timely clinical decisions, and allow patients to be more involved in their care on a day-to-day basis.”
“We will start with end-stage patients with hyperkalemia issues and expand to earlier-stage patients,” he added.
Although Metyos is in its early stages, competition in this space is increasing due to growing interest in biowearables. But the company's focus on CKD sets it apart from many wearable competitors. Boulanger cites his five startups as major competitors: Biolinq, Alio, Protonintel, Kalium Health, and Renalyse. The latter two of his companies also focus on kidney conditions, but in their case patient tracking is based on home blood draws rather than real-time data. Extracted from biowearables.