K Health is a free personal health information app based on a proprietary approach called “People Like Me”. This idea, that could make googling in the dark a thing of the past, recently raised a $12.5M venture round. The participating investors include Mangrove Capital Partners, Lerer Hippeau Ventures, Primary Ventures Partners, the Box Group, Max Ventures, Bessemer Ventures, and Comcast Ventures.

PC: K Health

K Health has built a completely data-driven health app because of its access to a unique dataset of over one billion health interactions, which include physician notes, lab results, treatments and prescriptions. It’s aim is not proactive care like other startups but to help people cut down on the time spent reading confusing and misleading information online. “We all know the feeling of waking up at 2:00 a.m. and researching our symptoms online even though we know it’ll only make our anxiety skyrocket, ultimately making things worse,” Allon Bloch, the co-founder and CEO of K Health said. “Today, if you go online and search for something as simple as a cough, you’ll see millions of results ranging from the common cold to cancer.”

This simple and rather predictable problem statement got Bloch, serial entrepreneur and former CEO of Vroom, Wix, Dolphin Software, thinking over how to convert generic information to personalized, insightful responses and launch K Health in 2016 with co-founder Ran Shaul.

The Siri For Symptoms

K Health operates through an android or iOS app where users can chat with what’s called ‘K’, or an “AI assistant for health” any time they feel under the weather. Users answer K’s questions about their symptoms to discover how people with similar medical histories and biological traits such as age, gender, and body mass were treated in a clinical setting.

K Health’s blog explains how it works: Say you’re a 35-year old man with moderate low back pain that comes on gradually and gets worse when you move. You click through a popular symptom checker to see what it might be, and the top two results are cauda equina, a serious surgical emergency, and lumbar spinal stenosis, a condition that’s extremely rare in men of this age. Tell K about these symptoms, and she’ll show you that 90% of guys at this age with these symptoms had a low back strain.

PC: K Health

Or, for instance, say, you want to know about something more common such as persistent headaches: K will ask you a series of questions such as “how long have you had headaches’ or ‘tap where you feel the pain’ in a diagram in the app. The app would then formulate the results which can show how many people have had the same symptoms. The user might then be advised according to what those with the same symptoms did—say, they went to their primary care doctors—or how doctors treated people like the user when they had the same symptoms. In doing so, K hopes to equip consumers with personalized information that not only cuts the unnecessary time spent researching but also allows users to make better decisions about health.

But should one be asking Dr Google or Dr K in the first place?

Although dangerous, even doctors believe that looking up information online is now a standard. Therefore, the least that can be done is reducing the hysteria associated with it. “I don’t want you to read that you have ‘insert dreaded, invariably painful or fatal disease’ after being sick for 4 hours”, writes Dr Neil Brown, the Chief Medical Officer of Kang Health. “I want you to have access to current, up to date, relevant information on your symptoms.”

Therefore, what a more reliable symptom-check approach does is that it makes it clear to the user that extreme diagnoses are uncommon and that statistically, many people have had those symptoms. It then shows you how others dealt with it and thereby reduces the stress associated with looking up symptoms on a generic platform.

While other symptom-checks are available online, they’re based on rules: rules which show how certain symptoms add up to diagnoses for hundreds of conditions or rules that factor in genetic differences. The problem, however, in a rules-based approach is that one will need infinite rules in infinite possible combinations in order to replicate the complexity of human experience.

K, on the other hand, is not based on rules but artificial intelligence. “We let K learn the rules by observing millions of real cases—just like doctors learn during residency, except faster,” Ran Shaul, co-founder of K Health says. K has had access to 15 years of real anonymized health data, including medical notes from millions of doctor visits which, the company claims, has helped them understand the connections between the symptoms, diagnoses, tests, and treatments people experience. “K turns these learnings into a kind of medical ontology, the language of experience, that she can use to talk to users anywhere in the world.”

The other, obvious benefit with automation is that K can operate on a different scale, seeing more patients in a day than a doctor does in his/her entire life. Going forward, it can also tell users what medications were used to treat the symptom they have or what tests were ordered.

But at the moment, K Health, which is HIPAA compliant, has partnered with a network of providers for same-day appointments and remote advice for more efficient care. One such partnership is with Integrity Family Care where the K report can be shared with the medical care provider who can then advice rest, medication, test, or a visit.

Care, the startup assures you, is only delivered by a doctor and rightly so, because K’s AI is at a nascent stage. Numerous K Health app users have left reviews on Google Playstore complimenting the idea but complaining how the symptom-check was just like Google or WebMD, “inaccurate”.

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The biotechnology startup is developing a peptide-based pill, which could prevent the growth of kidney stones by reducing the level of oxalate in blood and urine. It is being helped along thanks to $2.3M in funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The company will receive the grant in two tranches – one this month, and another a year hence in September 2019, as part of the NIH’s Small Business Technology Transfer Program.

Academia, Technology, and Oxalo

The Small Business Technology Transfer Program (STTR) is one of the largest sources of funding for technology commercialization in the US, and aims to foster technological innovation and public-private partnerships. Like PreScouter, the program searches for innovation in academia, and then tries to bring it to market through commercialization.

Oxalo Therapeutics was founded in academia in February 2017 by Dr. Hatim Hassan, an assistant professor of medicine at the University of Chicago, and Yang Zheng, a student at the university’s Booth School of Business. They named the company after Oxalobacter formigenes, a gut bacteria linked to reduced risks of kidney stones. They had received $250k from the University of Chicago Innovation Fund in December 2017, and $25k from the Booth School of Business’ New Venture Challenge in May.

The company has yet to generate any revenue – according to Zheng, Oxalo’s COO, it is because their focus is on progressing through the scientific development process as quickly as possible, while remaining well-capitalized. This process involves de-risking studies, animal studies, as well as optimizing the formula with which to take the drug to market. According to Crain’s Chicago Business, Oxalo is expected to take 2 years before coming to market. Zheng also gives credit to the University of Chicago’s Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation.

The reason they’re generating this much support and attention may have to do with the stunning business potential for the idea. According to the National Kidney Foundation, the lifetime risk of kidney stones is 19% for men and 9% for women. The only way to currently prevent kidney stones is through lifestyle changes.

Preventive health vs. medical solutions

Current consensus around preventing health suggests dietary changes – drink more water, eat less sodium, eat more calcium-rich foods, eat fewer chocolates and reduce intake of animal protein, and so forth. However, even a cursory understanding of human nature would demonstrate that such changes are hard to adopt.

The prospect, therefore, of an orally administered preventive pill which can actively reduce oxalate levels – correlated with the incidence of kidney stones – they can provide the solution for kidney stones that patients have been waiting for. One which is easy to adhere to, doesn’t require much change with lifestyle, and is effective could come as welcome relief.

The increasing frequency of kidney stones suggests that for reasons which we are still discovering in more detail, this is an escalating problem with no end in sight. However, the cause for this increased frequency is still unknown. Treating oxalate levels in the blood and urine will certainly help reduce the chances of kidney stones, but we have no way of determining the effectiveness of this solution in the longer term. Given that the cause for the increasing frequency of this medical problem continues to be unknown, Oxalo’s pill might not address the root problem.

Oxalo’s potential

None of that, however, changes the business potential of Oxalo’s pill. Looked at purely from a commercial perspective, the trend suggests that the market for the pill is growing. Since the pill isn’t a cure as much as it is a way to keep oxalate levels under control, it would require regular use. It would be the first conventional medical preventive treatment for kidney stones, and as such holds the potential for changing the market for treating kidney stones forever.

According to a market research report, the kidney stones management market is expected to hit $3B by 2022 at a 4% CAGR. The stakes and the human costs are extremely high, too – each year, more than half a million people go to emergency rooms in hospitals for treatment for kidney stones. While fatalities from kidney stones are largely unheard of, their impact upon the quality of life of Americans is likely to be large.

If Oxalo’s pill ends up being effective, it will be a very useful way to control and reduce Calcium Oxalate stones, which are the most common form of kidney stones. Having a product which caters to 1 out of 10 Americans and gives them relief from this commonplace medical condition lends greatly to the company’s potential.

Oxalo is currently looking to increase their total capital through the MassChallenge Boston, a nonprofit competition which promotes top businesses. The challenge awards winners $105k to the top early-stage startups, and Oxalo has made it to the top 26 and results will be announced in October.

Kidney Stones

The end goal, Zheng says, is partnering with a large pharma major, or selling their asset to one to bring it to market. Until that payday comes, Oxalo looks all set to crush the challenges in their past – and move further along the road to developing their pioneering solution.

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