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Alexander Kalis, correspondent for Impact Entrepreneur, sat down with Andrew Shaw, founder of Attomarker to discuss the importance of testing for personalized health and well-being and how Attomarker are helping to address the future of medicine.
Andrew, it’s a pleasure to speak with you today and to discuss the fascinating work behind Attomarker. Could you explain what Attomarker is and how important testing is for personalized health and well-being for society?
Andrew Shaw (AS): Personalized medicine is a rapidly evolving pro-active paradigm for healthcare, individualizing the patient’s symptoms, precision diagnosis, and personalized treatment. Precision Medicine is data-hungry and requires better biomarker profiles to treat individuals as personalized endotypes, phenotypes, and theratypes.
Whilst medicine in the UK is mainly focused on the treatment of symptoms, this marks a distinct shift to prophylaxis, where diseases with high associated healthcare burdens and costs are prevented from arising in the first place. We are all individuals and our medical treatment should not be generic – it should be based on our genetics and unique endotypic characteristics. This is the future of diagnosis and medicine.
Attomarker has developed a technology for measuring multiple biomarkers in blood and saliva, indeed all bodily fluids, to provide a personal profile in 7 minutes. The data is sent to the Cloud for Big Data and AI to determine a personalized patient healthcare pathway across multiple healthcare settings: at the bedside, in the operating theatre, at the pharmacy, and at home. The platform technology is endlessly applicable, with an assay possible for any protein/biomarker for which an antibody pair (capture and detection) can be raised. The challenge comes in choosing the right biomarkers to detect; recent research revealed that 98% of discovered clinical biomarkers never make it to clinical application – there is huge redundancy in the biomarker market and those that make a meaningful contribution to affecting the patient care pathway are sought above all others.
Attomarker is focussed on four global pandemics: COVID-19, Obesity, Food Allergy and Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR).