MIT-led team receives funding to develop a wearable monitor for early disease detection

MIT researchers will lead a four-year, up to $38 million project, funded by the U.S. Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), aimed at developing a noninvasive, wearable patch that continually monitors biomarkers of heart disease and sepsis.

The project is called PYTHIA, which stands for “predictive platform for physiological and therapeutic health intervention and adaptive management.”

According to the project plan, the patch, which will capture clinical-grade health information in real time, will be powered by heat from the patient’s body. It could provide essential information to help clinicians diagnose heart failure and sepsis early, before the diseases have caused irreversible damage. 

The researchers believe the minimally invasive device could also track the progress of a patient’s recovery after they are discharged from the hospital, and assist clinicians in developing more effective therapeutic approaches.

Catching common killers

Heart disease is the number one cause of death in the U.S., while sepsis kills at least 350,000 U.S. adults each year and is the leading cause of death in hospitals, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“We targeted these diseases because they are very lethal, but we also see opportunities for detecting biomarkers related to heart disease and sepsis to offer a solution that could really help improve diagnosis and treatment,” says principal investigator Ahmad Bahai, a professor of the practice in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) and a member of the Research Laboratory of Electronics at MIT.

Bahai will be joined on the project by MIT researchers Joel Voldman, the William R. Brody Professor of EECS; Tim Swager, the John D. MacArthur Professor of Chemistry; Hadley Sikes, the Willard Henry Dow Professor in Chemical Engineering; and Colin Stultz, the Nina T. and Robert H. Rubin Professor of EECS; with additional clinical and industry collaborators.

“We have created an ecosystem of R&D, with MIT at the center of it, to facilitate not only leading-edge research, but also a path toward translation into a device that can be used in the clinic,” Bahai says. “Our goal with this project is to impact the future of personalized health care.”

PYTHIA grew out of the MIT Program for Health Sciences and Semiconductors (HS+S), which Bahai co-founded when he joined MIT three years ago. The program focuses on leveraging advances in semiconductor technology and nanotechnology to invent new, transformative approaches to diagnostics, therapeutics, and drug discovery.

Inspired by his previous successful work on continuous glucose monitors, Bahai conducts research on a wide range of technologies including electrochemical devices, optics, magnetics, and ultrasonics in his “Waves, Bites, and Molecules” lab. His group’s goal is to offer clinical-grade wearable devices that track biomarkers continuously to enable real-time intervention techniques.

The glucose monitor research inspired Bahai and his colleagues to consider other biomarkers they could monitor in real-time using semiconductor technology, which led to the launch of PYTHIA.

The chip-based, wearable patch will monitor heart failure and sepsis biomarkers in interstitial fluid, which is the fluid under the skin. The biomarkers, molecules in blood plasma that are related to the onset of these diseases, are hard to detect because they exist in very low concentrations.

To measure the biomarkers in detail, the system will execute a chemical reaction that binds certain chemicals with the biomarker molecules in the interstitial fluid, making them easier to identify. The advanced microelectronics in the patch will conduct measurements, capturing biomarker data with enough sensitivity for clinical applications. 

Since the device will conduct measurements continuously, amassing a huge amount of data, PYTHIA will incorporate on-chip AI models to translate raw data into useful information for clinicians.

“This is kind of like having the patient give a blood test every 15 minutes or so, but it happens automatically. That is the power of this technology,” Bahai says.

From here, the team will start developing and testing electronic components for the tiny, low-power chip. Then they plan to advance the wearable device through pre-clinical and clinical trials, to the point that it can be commercially scaled and manufactured, Bahai says.

“This project has real potential to improve health care because, in addition to leveraging MIT’s leading-edge science and technology, we are also teaming up with clinical and industrial collaborators with direct experience of the practical constraints, the regulatory environment, and the clinical need,” he says. “The impact of this research could be huge.”

PYTHIA is funded through the ARPA-H Delphi Program led by Program Manager Leonard Tender. Delphi research teams apply a microelectronics design strategy to biosensing in an effort to develop devices that can safely, securely, and continuously monitor the body’s internal health signals. 

The project described here is supported by ARPA-H under agreement number AY2AX000243. The content of this announcement does not necessarily represent the official views of the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health.