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$ 113 billion

$ 113 billion costs for cancer treatment and respective medication

source: Morning Consult

6-9% increase

6-9% yearly increase in costs for cancer treatment

source: Morning Consult

Research Thesis

  • The “inner body clock” affects the outcome of drug treatment, amongst other things, in each individual patient.
  • Individual patients metabolize drugs differently at different times depending on the respective patient’s body clock.
  • This aspect is currently hardly ever considered in drug treatment.

Medical Need

  • Diagnostic method for determining individual biorhythms
  • More accurately targeted drug administration according to biorhythm towards improving treatment outcomes and reducing side effects, especially in heavily medicated indications such as cancer treatment

Solution

  • A digital diagnostic platform using intelligent medical algorithms that identifies and analyses chronobiologic patterns for remote patient monitoring and individual treatment adjustment in real-time.
  • The platform combines sensor-based wearables for continuous biological data measurement with high-resolution software for medical evaluation.
Research Status

We have studied the relationship between core body temperature and human biorhythms in real-life conditions in a study led by Prof. Dr. Werner Korf in collaboration with chronobiologists at the Goethe University of Frankfurt (Ekhart 2017).

The study has demonstrated wide differences in biorhythms from one person to the next, and that individuals show temperature curves that vary from one day to the next.

These new findings demonstrate the importance of individual diagnoses in more targeted drug administration, amongst other things. This would allow an exact determination of the time for certain drugs to be taken. Many drugs show substantial differences in mode of action and compatibility depending on the temperature phase in which they are taken (Lévi 1996). This points to the suitability of core body temperature as a biomarker in chrono-oncology towards improving the efficiency of tumor treatment.
Body-core temperature also shows great potential as a chronobiologic biomarker in diagnosing diseases associated with body-clock dysfunction, such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.

Publication

D Ekhart, H Wicht, T Kersken, H Ackermann, M Kaczmarczyk, G Pretzsch, H Alexander & HW Korf (2017):

Dynamics of core body temperature cycles in longterm measurements under real life conditions in women, Chronobiology International, DOI:10.1080/07420528.2017.1375942

Article