|05.20.20| Apple, Google's contact tracing API goes live; Elekta snaps up Kaiku Health

Swedish oncology-focused Elekta has announced its purchase of Kaiku Health, a Helsinki-based startup focused on patient monitoring and patient-reported outcome services.

As part of this deal Kaiku Health’s app, which allows patients to track symptoms over time and can alert doctors or researchers with updates, will be integrated into Elekta’s Mosaiq Oncology Information System.

“Including intelligent patient-monitoring software in the Elekta portfolio supports the company’s oncology informatics strategy,” Richard Hausmann, Elekta president and CEO, said in a statement. “This is a concrete step towards expanding our digital portfolio to further digitally connect our two most important stakeholders: our customers and their patients. Kaiku Health’s solution has demonstrated it can improve quality of life and reduce costs of healthcare.”

Kaiku got its start in 2012, when the founders were still in university. It began piloting its tech at a comprehensive cancer center in Helsinki called Docrates Syöpäsairaala. By 2019 the company had expanded across five European countries and 60 clinics.

“Here was a small company from Finland [that is] able to have the potential to reach and support the quality of life for patients,” Lauri Sippola, CEO of Kaiku, told MobiHealthNews last year during a trip to its Helsinki office. “This is what we are here trying to do, and [we] have had some good progress along the years and [are] hoping to go even further and reach more patients.”

Over the years, Kaiku has a history of teaming up with pharma companies. In March of 2019, it inked a deal with Amgen to roll out digital symptom-tracking for multiple myeloma, a type of bone marrow cancer.

The company was funded, scoring $5.4 million in a Series A found led by Debiopharm Innovation Fund SA and Tesi.

WHY IT MATTERS

Both companies focus on some degree of personalized medicine for the oncology space. The companies are pitching their coming together as a way to bring different facets of that space into one space.

“Together we will continue to develop personalized digital interventions in order to help improve the lives of cancer patients globally,” Sippola said in a statement. “Measuring what matters to patients is paramount in value-based healthcare and it will benefit patients, healthcare providers and society.”

THE LARGER TREND

We are beginning to see a rise in oncology-focused digital tools. In fact, last month we saw another M&A in the oncology space. Remote-monitoring and decision-support startup Biofourmis announced its plans to acquire Takeda Pharmaceuticals’ Gaido Health, an oncology-focused digital tool, for an undisclosed sum. The new cash deal is expected to help Biofourmis further its foothold on the oncology space.

Within the last year we’ve seen a number of funding rounds support cancer-focused startups. Most recently, Paige, a computational pathology platform, scored an additional $5 million from Goldman Sachs, which boosted their Series B funding to $50 million.

In January, Atlanta-based oncology-management platform OncoLens landed $2.5 million in a Pre-Series A round led by Atlanta Technology Angels and the Robbins Fund.

Roughly a month after first announcing their unprecedented collaboration, Apple and Google have updated their devices' operating systems today with the first component of their contact tracing API.

Referred to by the companies as "Exposure Notifications," the technology aims to help public health agencies deploy apps that tell individuals when they may have been exposed to another person with COVID-19.

Device owners must opt in to enable the functionality, which according to the companies does not collect location data. The tech companies also noted in their joint announcement that individual users ultimately decide whether or not to report their positive COVID-19 diagnosis through the public health agency's app.

"Over the last several weeks, our two companies have worked together, reaching out to public health officials, scientists, privacy groups and government leaders all over the world to get their input and guidance," the companies wrote in the statement. "Today, this technology is in the hands of public health agencies across the world who will take the lead and we will continue to support their efforts."

WHY IT MATTERS

Contact tracing is a key component of outbreak mitigation that allows public health officials to more quickly identify potential new cases. However, traditional contact tracing is a labor-intensive process where public health groups interview confirmed cases to identify any other individuals they might have infected.

This opens the doors for an automated approach to the practice – one that bakes these capabilities into the operating systems of the two biggest smartphone platforms and immediately places these tools into the hands of as many people as possible.

But the past few weeks have seen a handful of concerns voiced from security specialists, public health figures and certain governments, such as the potential of a self-reporting system to yield false positives. While the Bluetooth-based system described by the companies in draft documentation places a key focus on data security and cryptography, big tech's less-than-stellar track record when it comes to privacy has many consumers wary of the technology.

THE LARGER TREND

So far, the most notable holdout among government groups has been the U.K.'s NHSX. The digital health service said that a more centralized system than Apple and Google are offering would allow for more rapid adaptation as additional coronavirus data is collected.

Other countries like Australia have already rolled out their own COVID-19 tracing apps, with some like India going the extra mile by requiring all workers to download its government-run app.

Bluetooth-based contact tracing has also been proposed by researchers who, like tech companies, stressed the privacy benefits a non-GPS approach has to offer. On the other hand, a recent review from the Ada Lovelace Institute warned that "the significant technical limitations, and deep social risks, of digital contact tracing outweigh the value offered to the crisis response."