In Acute Ischaemic Stroke (AIS), a blot clot suddenly blocks a major vessel supplying the brain with oxygen, killing 1.9 million nerve cells (neurons) every minute. Thus, “time is brain” in AIS and it is therefore critical that the patient instantly receives the best treatment. At the same time, stroke development and response to treatment are medically complex and depend on a vast range of patient-specific characteristics, which puts a tremendous pressure on hospital emergency staff. In the emergency setting of AIS a plethora of information must be considered by a specialized physician including imaging, clinical presentation and electronic health record data before safely committing the optimal therapy. For certain stroke profiles clot-busting (attempting to unblock the artery) with pharmaceuticals or surgery has optimal prognosis, whereas for others this implies a high risk of an intracerebral haemorrhage. Specialized stroke units are, however, very scarce in EU and worldwide. Indeed, only 5% of hospitals have facilities meeting the standards of comprehensive stroke centres, which reflects the fact that only about 30% of AIS patients receive specialized stroke unit care across Europe. Annually, 15 million people worldwide suffer a AIS leading to 5 million deaths and 5 million people permanently disabled.
The iTrust solution by COMBAT Stroke enables any hospital to instantaneously provide state-of-the-art management of emergency patients with AIS. iTrust is a clinical decision support system utilizing advanced medical imaging and clinical data from thousands of patients together with new technology to identify complex risk profiles in large unstructured data using dedicated deep learning technologies developed at COMBAT Stroke.
Today only 7% of patients with AIS are treated with clot-busting drugs and it is estimated, that even for ideal candidates up to 40% are not treated. The iTrust solution not only reduces time to treatment and guides the optimal medical intervention, but also promotes treatment in general through automated management. Moreover, most AIS patients arrive too late at the hospital to be considered candidates for therapy under today’s guidelines (4.5 hours). The iTrust solution has the potential to extend the treatment window by objectively assessing each patient’s individual potential for favourable outcome even with late treatment. iTrust can therefore substantially increase the number of patients receiving active therapy.
Combat Stroke forecasts to achieve cumulated revenues of over €41M and EBITDA of €30M within five years after market rollout. The feasibility study represents a key step towards the implementation of our overall innovation project, the primary goal of which is to validate the solution in patient cohorts, obtain CE-marking and finalize EU and US market strategy and business model. The project will also involve technology refinements in ease-of-use, such as user experience (UX) design, software/user interface. Through a methodical market survey, the demand for iTrust was clearly validated. Our study has shown that the above ambition is realistic if a focused route-to-market strategy is followed.
