Chinese Internet giant Tencent has led a $750,000 seed round in Baltimore-based wound-care startup Tissue Analytics, TechCrunch is reporting. Also participating in the funding was DreamIt Health, the Philadelphia-based accelerator which Tissue Analytics went through last July, along with several healthcare angels also from the Philadelphia area.
Tissue Analytics is focused on the chronic wound care, such as bedsores and diabetic ulcers, relying on a smartphone’s camera as a more objective tool for measuring and quantifying wound healing.
Tissue Analytics is looking to bring a radiology-style approach to the field of chronic wound care.“The only good way that doctors or nurses have today to demonstrate that a wound is healing is using a ruler to measure the dimensions of the wound,” says co-founder Kevin Keenahan. “This technique is so variable and prone to error – the measurement is so noisy that doctors can’t actually determine if a wound is healing, or if the treatment’s working, so they kind of just rely on guess work. And visual approximation. So we want to bring a decimal level of understanding of the actual status of wound healing.”
Tissue Analytics’ tech allows for wound data to be collected via its smartphone app and then send that information to a web portal from where specialist doctors are able to manage multiple patients remotely. The idea, according to the company, is to bring a radiology-style approach to the field of chronic wound care.
“From a photo, right now, we can determine the surface area [of a wound], the contraction rates, the length and width measurements – so most of what the nurses would do today – and we do segment tissues,” Keenahan adds. “We don’t put clinical labels on them at this point but we can actually present some more advanced information to clinicians today.”
The team behind the software spun out of the Center for Bioengineering Innovation & Design at Johns Hopkins University in spring 2014, launching a limited beta version of the app last November, and rolling out a more open beta this April. Customer numbers are not being revealed at this point.
Beyond the U.S. market, Tissue Analytics is looking to expand to developing countries of the world. “We are really excited in working with some of the companies in [Tencent’s] portfolio that could help us start to look at the developing world as a real market,” Keenahan concluded.