LEO Science & Tech Hub Partners With Epicore Biosystems on Wearable Skin Sensors

LEO Science & Tech Hub, an R&D innovation unit of LEO Pharma, has announced a new partnership with Epicore Biosystems to explore the use of a non-invasive, wearable sweat sensor to measure prognostic biomarkers in real time, monitor patient response and inform treatment decisions. The initial project will include a proof of concept study in collaboration with engineers and dermatologists at Northwestern University’s Center for Bio-Integrated Electronics and Feinberg School of Medicine’s Department of Dermatology to establish baseline measurements and milestones to validate the clinical relevance of the approach for patients with atopic dermatitis (eczema).
 
“A central goal of precision medicine is to predict early on if a given treatment will work for the individual patient. As atopic dermatitis (eczema) is a diverse skin disease, not all patients will benefit equally from a given treatment,” said Michael Sierra, vice president of the LEO Science & Tech Hub. “The possibility of enabling healthcare professionals to characterize skin hydration and disease-specific biomarker responses in real-time and in turn, helping them provide personalized treatment regimens for patients, is an extremely powerful concept. We believe that wearable technologies will have a major impact on the future of healthcare and LEO is fortunate for the opportunity to contribute our expertise in skin research and drug development to this project.”

The LEO Science & Tech Hub is recognized for its collaborative approach of seeking cutting-edge technology for dermatological applications. Since its launch, the Hub has successfully formed multiple collaborations to explore minimally invasive biomarker technologies, drug delivery devices, advanced imaging systems and remote monitoring methods with leading research institutes and biotechnology companies including MIT, The Karp Lab, Novopyxis, Elektrofi and The Wellman Center for Photomedicine at Massachusetts General Hospital.
 
“The possibilities for driving targeted therapies based on high throughput and low-cost analysis of biomarkers in sweat are limitless,” said Roozbeh Ghaffari, Ph.D., co-founder and CEO of Epicore Biosystems. “We’re excited about our partnership with LEO Science and Tech Hub, and see it leading to new classes of wearable metabolic sensors that enable remote tracking of skin disease biomarkers and help accelerate interventions once patients leave the hospital.”
 
“Sweat is a largely unexplored body fluid when it comes to disease biomarkers. I am excited about this project as it pushes the boundaries of both our technological knowhow and our biological understanding. Our vision, which is to develop an ‘at-home-patch’ test, will give patients the ability, early on, to determine if they benefit from a particular antibody treatment or need to try an alternative,” said Troels Marstrand, chief data scientist at LEO Science and Tech Hub.
 
Epicore Biosystems is a spinout company from Prof. John Rogers’ Laboratory at Northwestern University’s Center for Bio-Integrated Electronics. Epicore Biosystems has developed skin-like wearable fluidic sensors that are capable of non-invasively measuring metabolic and digital biomarkers in real-time. The company has established partnerships with Fortune 100 companies, the U.S.  Department of Defense, and research hospitals to drive personalized care with their wearable fluidic products.
 
The Center for Bio-Integrated Electronics (CBIE) was established in 2016 by Rogers as part of the Simpson Querrey Institute for BioNanotechnology. The CBIE supports fundamental, applied and translational biomedical research to develop soft, biocompatible forms of bioelectronics with unique functionality that could fundamentally transform healthcare.
 
The LEO Science & Tech Hub is an R&D innovation unit of LEO Pharma dedicated to identifying, developing, and funding innovative solutions that improve the lives of people with skin diseases. It was founded in 2016 as a catalyst to transform early-stage innovations into solutions for improving the lives of people with skin diseases. It collaborates, explores cutting-edge ideas, and makes investments. The Hub is comprised of an agile group of scientific experts with an entrepreneurial mindset and a vision of how to give patients control over disease by predicting, diagnosing, and monitoring conditions. The LEO Science & Tech Hub is based in Cambridge, Mass.