About 90% of the 30 million people in the U.S. who are living with chronic kidney disease (CKD) aren’t aware that they have it. By the time symptoms become noticeable, people with CKD are usually in stage 3 of this five-stage disease, with stage 5 being kidney failure.

Early diagnosis and treatment are crucial for slowing, or even halting, CKD before it reaches advanced stages, requiring dialysis or a kidney transplant. Scanwell Health, an LA-based health tech startup, has received a $1.6 million Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant from the National Institutes of Health to help make easy and early diagnosis of CKD a reality.*

What’s Scanwell’s solution?

The grant supports further research and development of Scanwell’s new rapid, at-home CKD test kit. Scanwell has already provided technology for a home-based urinary tract infection (UTI) test kit that enables your smartphone to analyze your urine test strip with an app. In doing so, this saves you both time and the expense of a doctor’s office visit, as well as the wait for lab test results.  

The CKD rapid at-home test kit would work similarly, using a urine test strip and a smartphone app for both screening and early-stage disease monitoring. The intended results are more timely diagnosis, treatment, and care. 

Is the test available commercially?

The kit is not yet commercially available, but an early version is being used by researchers at major hospitals and medical centers, including Johns Hopkins Hospital, Cleveland Clinic, and Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania.

“We want to live in a world where kidney disease never comes out of left field, but far too often, it does,” said Stephen Chen, founder and CEO of Scanwell. “We developed this technology to give an early warning, which will dramatically improve the quality of life for millions of people.”

*Pennic, F. (2020, Sept. 21). Scanwell Health Nabs $1.6M NIH Grant for its Rapid, At-Home Test for Chronic Kidney Disease. HIT Consultant. https://hitconsultant.net/2020/09/21/scanwell-health-nih-grant-ckd-at-home-test/