AireHealth Inc. is Merging With BreathResearch

In a strategic move to further revolutionize care for the more than 100 million patients with chronic respiratory diseases and deliver the industry’s first virtual care platform for respiratory illness, AireHealth Inc. has reached a merger agreement with BreathResearch, a respiratory healthcare company that detects increasing declines in respiratory health status. AireHealth adds to its capabilities all of BreathResearch’s assets including employees, intellectual property, research, published works, and patents related to respiratory drug delivery, medication adherence, and analysis of breathing sounds using machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI).

With this acquisition, Nirinjan Yee, BreathResearch’s founder, is named AireHealth’s head of Innovation. AireHealth now adds a physical presence in Silicon Valley, Calif. Financial terms were not disclosed.
 
Following the acquisition, the combined entity will operate as AireHealth and address the growing challenges in respiratory illness that cost more than $130 billion per year as well as cause 49.2 deaths per 100,000 people. The VitalBreath virtual care platform will empower patients, caregivers, and clinicians to be more informed and collaborative in respiratory care, enabling faster response to exacerbations and translating to fewer emergencies and fewer hospitalizations.
 
When AireHealth Co-Founders Stacie Ruth and Jason Eichenholz, Ph.D., discussed how to create significant value for the business and help as many people as possible receive improved respiratory care at home, they agreed to be bold leaders in the face of the rapidly changing healthcare landscape. “We decided that our plan was to accelerate the AireHealth journey into respiratory digital therapeutics by acquiring a company that will help us save lungs and lives, and that company is BreathResearch,” said Ruth, also the firm’s CEO.
 
VitalBreath brings together connected devices for drug delivery and respiratory measurement, lung health scoring backed by 35 clinically validated biomarkers, patient-centered apps, and therapy adherence tracking. By tracking symptoms, status, decline, interventions and outcomes, AireHealth can build data sets for clinical benchmarks, improve early detection of respiratory diseases and reduce high costs.
 
“I am very pleased to see our years of research and development in respiratory diagnostics and artificial intelligence come together with AireHealth’s medication delivery and adherence as an integrated platform that can address the unmet needs and gaps in respiratory care,” said Yee. “In becoming a part of AireHealth, we marry our respective intellectual property into one very powerful portfolio that will undoubtedly yield important and impactful technology innovation for many years to come.”
 
Since its inception, AireHealth has embraced the continued shifts in the medical device industry that have opened up new opportunities in digital health, and the acquisition of BreathResearch paves the way for AireHealth’s further transformation towards the digital therapeutics market.