Epicore Biosystems CEO on harnessing thousands of biomarkers contained in your sweat to extract key health insights.
Earlier this year, we brought you the story of Epicore Biosystems, which secured $26 million in Series B funding to advance its wearable biosensors that non-invasively analyze sweat to provide real-time, personalized health insights. The company’s platform uses microfluidic channels and biosensors to detect and quantify biomarkers in perspired sweat, offering a window into hydration status, electrolyte balance, metabolic health and even stress and glucose levels.
While Epicore has, to date, been predominantly focused on industrial and sports-related applications, the company is increasingly looking at the potential its technology holds in longevity and preventive health. With continuous glucose monitors (CGMs) fast becoming a consumer health staple, could sweat monitoring soon follow?
Longevity.Technology: Unlike a host of health wearables that focus on established metrics like steps or heart rate, Epicore’s technology taps into the rich biochemical data available in our sweat, potentially enabling a more nuanced understanding of the body’s physiological state. To find out more about the company’s plans to harness the data from sweat to generate health insights, we caught up with the Epicore founder and CEO, Dr Roozbeh Ghaffari.
A biomedical engineer and neuroscientist by training, Ghaffari is also a professor at Northwestern University’s Biomedical Engineering Department. He is quick to stress that looking at the diagnostic potential of sweat is not a new idea, and has been studied for decades from the standpoint of electrolytes and fluid loss and hydration.
“More recently, however, there is an increasing body of research highlighting the various proteins and metabolites also contained in sweat – things like glucose, cortisol, lactate, urea and creatinine, for example,” says Ghaffari. “As we started to look closer, we’ve found there are literally thousands of biomarkers that we take for granted which are present in our sweat. And we just wipe it away with a towel and throw it in the laundry basket.”
Validating sweat-based biomarkers
Epicore started out targeting athletes and industrial workers, which makes sense – these are professions where sweating is often part and parcel of the job. But Ghaffari says that even people who don’t appear to sweat at all are still producing small quantities containing potentially valuable health insights.
“It turns out that you’re always sweating a little bit, it’s just evaporating as it hits your skin,” he explains. “We’re exploring ways to tap in to that sweat, without having to use micro needles, the way a CGM does. The burden is high – it’s a nascent area – so what we have to do is pick targets and validate them.”
For Epicore, validating its sweat-based measurements means a painstaking process of comparing with blood-based measurements.
“We need to see how it compares – is it the same, is it correlated?” says Ghaffari. “In a lot of cases, correlation is really the key indicator that you know you’re on to something. But that’s not always the case – there are some biomarkers that aren’t absorbed into your sweat ducts and glands the same way as certain electrolytes, toxins or even drugs are. So you’ve got to take it case by case.”
Kidney health and micronutrients
One of the initial targets that Epicore is interested in validating is kidney health, an area that is closely aligned with healthspan and longevity – chronic kidney disease affects about 10% of the global population.
“Kidney health is really interesting to us because a lot of people don’t even know they have a problem – they’re often asymptomatic until things are quite far along, and in some cases, it’s too late,” says Ghaffari. “We know we can measure urea and creatinine levels, which correspond to your kidney health and function. We’re actively working in that area and seeing good correlations.”
Another area of interest to Epicore is monitoring levels of key micronutrients that are essential for our overall health.
“We know we can measure micronutrients in sweat – calcium, iron, zinc, vitamin C – they’re all in sweat, and they’re changing all the time,” says Ghaffari. “How do you know your supplementation is working? Lots of people are taking vitamin D once a day, with no consideration of height, weight, metabolism, exercise, or whether they are even deficient at all. So we see some interesting possibilities there, based on the fact that we have the ability to measure these micronutrient targets.”
Continuous sweat monitoring?
Once Epicore has validated a new target, the company can leverage one of two different platform technologies to monitor it. Its first product, the Gx Sweat Patch, is a single-use, colorimetric patch that provides users with immediate feedback via a companion smartphone app, which analyzes color changes to generate a personalized sweat profile.
More recently, the company launched the Connected Hydration platform for continuous monitoring. Comparable to a non-invasive CGM, the system comprises a wireless connected patch or armband that tracks real-time data from sweat, complete with haptic feedback when potential issues are detected.
“We’ve spent three years developing Connected Hydration – it does second-by-second measurement of fluid loss, sodium, skin temperature, motion, all in one device,” says Ghaffari. “It doesn’t yet do other measurements like kidney health, micronutrients or cortisol levels, but this is a platform that we can potentially use for any of our validated targets – and it’s a huge area of focus for us.”
With many potential options for the Epicore to focus on, how does it plan to spend its Series B funding? Carefully, according to Ghaffari.
“We know there are thousands of potential biomarkers we could be looking at, so we have to be very picky about which ones to go after,” he says. “We will continue to scale in our existing markets, while simultaneously developing new biomarkers, like kidney health and micronutrients, which are key areas of focus for us over the next three to five years.”
“We’ve been very fortunate to working with companies like PepsiCo and various other big brands on deployment and validation our products. Partnerships and customer relationships with enterprises is a key focus of ours, and I’m anticipating that it will be the same for the new biomarkers that we bring to market.”
Photographs courtesy of Epicore Biosystems.
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