With healthcare budgets at breaking point, there is an increasingly desperate need to identify and treat illnesses before they develop into long-term chronic conditions.
NHS Trusts and hospitals should leave no stone unturned in this quest. Yet many are perhaps unaware of a massively valuable asset they already hold in their archives, says Dr Wareed Alenaini.
Dr Alenaini is the founder and CEO of Twinn.health, the London-based MedTech startup behind a recently launched AI-driven imaging platform that aims to revolutionise the early detection of age-related diseases.
It does this by analysing data from MRI – magnetic resonance imaging – a type of scan that uses strong magnetic fields and radio waves to produce detailed images of the inside of the body.
“An MRI scan is quite expensive. But it’s not actually the equipment that costs,” Dr Alenaini tells BusinessCloud. “70% of the MRI cost is the doctor’s time for the analysis: an average scan is 150 images, and the doctor needs to go through all of them.
“The idea is to build a platform that can not only connect multiple stakeholders, but provide additional value from the current assets that every hospital has – and is going to waste. These images are in every archive, yet nobody’s getting any value out of them. They are massively valuable.”
Personalised approach
Key features of the platform include heatmaps, which are visual representations of areas of concern and adipose tissue within MRI scans; AI-generated risk scores reflecting a patient’s risk for highlighted diseases; and comprehensive AI case reports summarising key findings and analysis.
However the scans themselves are massively important to analysing patients – which is why Twinn.health’s tech, built on Dr Alenaini’s research at Imperial College London, overlays the existing images. “This type of imaging looks at pixel by pixel concentration of what is happening inside your body. It’s very personalised,” she says.
“Our mission is to unlock the true potential of imaging data to improve health outcomes and prevent multiple diseases with a single MRI scan.”
Twinn.health claims to identify chronic age-related diseases up to 10 years earlier than traditional molecular signals, making it a powerful tool for early intervention and prevention. The platform has been validated through a retrospective clinical study involving 400 patients and three radiologists.
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PhD studies
Dr Alenaini (above), Saudi born and raised, arrived in London in 2013 to complete her post-graduate studies. Following a Master’s in biotechnology, specialising in non-invasive diagnostic technologies, she completed a PhD in bioimaging – specialising in using these technologies to understand chronic conditions that occur in old age.
“These include things like muscle weakness, joint weakness, abdominal organ weakness,” she explains. “One of my PhD chapters looked at early diabetes. It’s a problem in Saudi, in the Gulf, especially with children – that’s the most devastating thing, actually.
“Here in the UK it is different: they start getting these diseases mid-life. It is less exposed in children.”
Based on anonymised data from previous patients, the platform is deliberately focused on the inclusion of ethnic groups – “not purely Caucasians”.
Funding
After meeting her co-founder, chief commercial officer Chris Mosedale, at international VC Antler, Dr Alenaini raised money from the 500 Startups accelerator in the United States to build a prototype then raised again from a pair of angel investors who are also physicians to begin its trial phase. After raising further capital from Saudi Aramco, it is now filing for an FDA approval in the States.
To date, the company has secured a total of $800k in pre-seed funding and established data partnerships with the UK Biobank, University of Edinburgh and Imperial College London.
“We are in hospitals and have really good feedback,” says the CEO. “The UK is our number one market, then the US – I’ve been speaking to lots of founders, who have been telling us that in our sector what they do in the UK in a year, they do in the US in a week! There are a lot of underlying challenges with the healthcare system here.
“We also believe the Middle East is a massive untapped market.”
Twinn.health is currently raising a pre-Series A round.