What You Should Know:
– DNA Company acquires AI-based digital therapeutics app My Pain Sensei (MPS) to form My Next Health and is building a COVID-19 risk assessment platform to help people understand their risks of developing serious COVID-19 complications.
– The acquisition combines functional genomics with conversational AI for patient self-management apps and disease tracking tools designed to inform clinician-patient interactions.
Leading functional genomics provider The DNA Company today announced that it has acquired AI-based digital therapeutics app My Pain Sensei (MPS) for approximately $30M, forming My Next Health. The acquisition of MPS gives My Next Health an AI-based platform to develop multiple health applications.
Self-Management through Digital Therapeutics
As My Next Health, the company will focus on using precision medicine and digital therapeutics to develop genomics-based health management applications that offer patients genetic insights tailored to their unique biology. The acquisition also provides My Next Health with a Class 1 Medical Device Establishment License from Health Canada for applications related to chronic pain and COVID-19.
My Next Health’s MPS platform, which combines big data and genomic insights with conversational AI and tracking tools, was developed by MPS through an engagement with IBM and includes access to more than 60 million electronic medical records and data from 32 billion claims.
Creating COVID-19 Complications Risk Platform
This data allows the platform to uncover key insights about identifiable symptoms, diagnoses, chronic pain treatment efficacy as well as for other chronic conditions. The My Next Health apps make those insights, tools, and interventions accessible to patients and their healthcare providers. As its first application, My Next Health is creating a COVID-19 application that assesses an individual’s risk profile for developing complications from the virus.
The My Next Health COVID-19 application will work by analyzing a person’s genetic pathways for inflammatory responses, insulin sensitivity and other genomic indicators through identifiable characteristics that factor into risk of COVID-19 complications. After determining an individual’s risk level, patients can use the application’s recommendations to help mitigate their risk using self-tracking tools that also can be shared with their healthcare providers.
My Next Health will continue building in new functionality over the next few months, with a fully functional application targeted for health systems or governments available this summer.
Given the immediate public need created by the COVID-19 pandemic, My Next Health is making a free online version of the application available to the public on May 15, which will include the conversational AI and intervention recommendations. The public version will be available at www.mynexthealth.com.
“The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed how a novel virus can upend the world’s healthcare system at a moment’s notice,” said Kashif Khan, CEO of My Next Health. “But, advances in functional genomics may allow us to better understand the underlying biological weaknesses that this novel virus exploits so that we can leverage existing treatment protocols to improve patient outcomes and reduce load on the healthcare system. The acquisition of MPS will help us tackle these and other problems.”
