Entia
Entia’s new, home-use, full blood count analyser that provides personalised and preventative care for cancer patients outside of hospital has been approved for use in the UK.
The unique analyser is at the heart of Entia’s comprehensive remote patient monitoring service, Liberty. Roughly the size of a laptop, it is designed to support cancer care in the home by giving patients a simple way of providing a full blood analysis using only a single drop of blood. The results are securely shared with healthcare professionals through Liberty’s dashboard alongside symptoms and vitals. Combined, they provide a comprehensive picture of a patient’s health without individuals having to travel for hospital-based check-ups.
The Liberty blood count analyser has been road-tested by over 1,000 cancer patients across five of the UK’s leading cancer treatment centres, including The Christie, Europe’s largest single-site cancer centre. Having received its UKCA Mark, it is now ready for wider use across the UK’s cancer treatment centres. In addition to being the world’s first regulated at-home full blood count analyser, it is also one of the first products to complete the full review process under the UK’s new safety standard, introduced post-Brexit to replace the EU CE mark. This also marks the start of wider plans for Liberty’s approval in international markets such as the US.
Cancer treatment is complex, with chemotherapy often delivering different outcomes and provoking different reactions from patients. Regular monitoring is essential to detect potential problems such as neutropenia, a common side effect of chemotherapy, which weakens the immune system and makes cancer patients highly vulnerable to serious infections. If people become unwell, this can cause delays to treatment or even hospitalisation due to complications. Currently, most monitoring is done through hospital outpatient appointments, which can be time consuming and expensive for people to get to and also resource intensive for healthcare providers.
By facilitating at-home testing and monitoring of symptoms and vitals, Liberty removes some of the pressures and time toxicity of routine assessments. It also opens up the possibility of more personalised care by increasing the frequency of monitoring. The real-time insights from the Liberty monitoring solutions not only provide healthcare professionals with the information they need to help mitigate costly and challenging hospitalisations but also unlock new possibilities to develop AI-based predictive tools that further enhance clinical decision making.
Entia was founded by CEO Dr Toby Basey-Fisher, who, driven by family experience and work with an oncology department, wanted to find practical ways to alleviate some of the treatment challenges and distressing personal impacts of cancer.
Basey-Fisher said: “Due to escalating staff shortages, increasing costs and hospital capacity constraints, maintaining or improving standards of patient care is an uphill battle. We’ve spent years collaborating with leading cancer institutes to identify major pain points for patients and providers. We’ve been able to recognise the need for a more individualised understanding of patients' health whilst undergoing therapy in order to guide more personalised and proactive treatment pathways. We’ve also seen desire from patients to receive care that’s built around their lives rather than having lives built around their care. Liberty is our combined answer to these needs.
“Receiving the UKCA mark has given us the green light for rolling out Liberty in cancer centres here in the UK and to help accelerate their move to more patient-centric oncology care.”
By freeing up hospital appointments and enabling early intervention to address potential complications, Liberty drives a more preventative model of care that could save valuable time and resources for healthcare providers currently facing considerable pressures.
Dr Sacha Howell, Senior Lecturer and Honorary Consultant in Medical Oncology at The Christie NHS Foundation Trust said: “Time toxicity is a very real thing for people with cancer. The time, energy and money spent getting to and during appointments is a significant factor in many people’s decisions about a particular course of treatment. By cutting out even just a few clinic visits Entia’s device could make a real difference to someone’s life and help make their cancer treatment more bearable.”
Professor Peter Schmid, Chair of Cancer Medicine at Barts Cancer Institute who advised Entia on the development of Liberty, added: “With Liberty, Entia has developed a practical solution that addresses some of the biggest challenges we face in treating an increasing number of people with cancer. Our clinics are getting busier and implementing technologies like this would allow us to manage people more comfortably at home, improve their experience of care and potentially reduce the severity and occurrence of treatment side effects. Plus by improving clinic capacity we can streamline services to free up time for our clinical teams and plan treatments more efficiently. It’s an amazing approach.”
