A Georgia Tech spinoff company, Sanguina, won nearly $1 million in a national health care competition for its anemia-detecting app for women who are pregnant or recently gave birth.
Sanguina’s AnemoCheck Mobile smartphone app personalized for women who are pregnant or recently delivered was one of six grand winners in the National Institutes of Health’s Maternal Health Challenge. The competition aims to develop new medical devices women can use at home or in clinics to help detect, diagnose and monitor conditions such as anemia in the first year after birth.
National health care organizations, including NIH, are seeking ways to decrease pregnancy-related complications and deaths.
The AnemoCheck Mobile app, which updates previous technology Sanguina developed in the past few years, estimates hemoglobin levels based on an image of the user’s nail beds without the use of a needle stick, the standard way to test blood.
Erika Tyburski and business partner Rob Mannino met as students at Georgia Tech. They worked with a professor there to develop the app and business concept before spinning off the company, a common practice at the Atlanta university. Tyburski and Mannino struggled with anemia, the most common blood disorder, and they teamed up to develop products for regular screening for the condition. Anemia results from not having enough red blood cells to carry oxygen throughout the body, which can worsen during pregnancy.
“During pregnancy, you have to create extra blood to make a baby,” said Tyburski, now CEO of the 10-year-old Sanguina, based in Peachtree Corners. A drop in hemoglobin, a protein in red blood cells, can occur during pregnancy. Too little hemoglobin can lead to complications such as blood loss, early delivery, low birth weight and difficulty making breast milk, said the mother of two.
A pale color under the nails indicates low hemoglobin. Red blood cells use hemoglobin to carry oxygen from the lungs to the rest of the body along with carbon dioxide from the body to the lungs to help us breathe. Low maternal hemoglobin concentrations can worsen maternal health.
The AnemoCheck Mobile app used in the maternal health competition is personalized to allow women to track changes in hemoglobin level at delivery and afterward. This app is the latest in a series of Sanguina products to help people with anemia test their hemoglobin at home. In 2021, Sanguina’s wellness mobile app, AnemoCheck Mobile, became available on Google Play and iOS app stores. The app determines an iron score, the likelihood of having iron deficiency, an indication of anemia, and iron-deficiency anemia. The app was tested on different skin tones and works effectively, Tyburski said.
Last year, the Food and Drug Administration cleared another Sanguina product, AnemoCheck Home, which allows people with anemia to test their hemoglobin at home with a finger stick that draws blood and returns a quick result. The at-home test kit will be on the market early next year, Tyburski said.
Tyburski expects official product testing on the AnemoCheck Mobile app personalized for pregnant and postpartum women to begin in the middle of next year with the hopes it will be on the market in 1½ years.
Sanguina won $940,000 in the NIH competition toward development of the phone app. NIH awarded a total of $8 million in the maternal care challenge. The contest allowed Sanguina to pilot test its app with guidance from OB-GYNs and reimbursement specialists who could discuss options for who will pay for the product once it reaches the market, Tyburski said.
The contest is an outgrowth of NIH’s Rapid Acceleration of Diagnostics Technology (RADx) program, which also brought COVID-19 tests to the market quicker during the pandemic.
The competition aimed to address health issues related to maternal health care deserts by promoting technology that can be used by women if they don’t have access to specialized postdelivery health care services.
About 42% of Georgia’s counties are considered maternity care deserts, compared with about 35% in the U.S., according to the March of Dimes’ 2024 report on maternal care access, “Nowhere to Go: Maternity Care Deserts Across the US.”
NIH evaluated more than 80 submissions before sending technology from 10 finalists to Emory University’s obstetrics and gynecology clinics for further testing on patients. NIH chose six grand-prize winners and two runner-up winners from the finalists.
RADx has been working for several years with a validation center for health technology research formed through an academic partnership among Emory, Georgia Tech and Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta. The center’s mission is to unite clinicians, technologists and entrepreneurs to bring engineered technology to market quicker, including smartphone-based products.
“We make sure the devices work the way we want them to work,” said Morgan Greenleaf, an Emory School of Medicine program manager who oversaw the Maternal Health Challenge testing.
The technology developed by the competition finalists, including wearable devices, tries to solve health issues such as cardiovascular risks, hemorrhage or urinary tract infections. The finalists are in various stages of product development or market approval.
As part of the Maternal Health Challenge, more than 60 women tested the finalist products to see if they are easy to use and work effectively to try to solve a health issue compared with what’s on the market or current methods of care.
In terms of the overall goal of the competition, he said, “there’s a recognition that more needs to be done to reduce maternity mortality, particularly postpartum [postdelivery] and one year after birth, when most mortality happens.”
Nearly 70% of maternal deaths in the U.S. occur during the postpartum period or up to 42 days following birth, according to a 2024 report from The Commonwealth Fund, which promotes equitable health care and research. Most of the deaths, which are preventable, involve severe bleeding, high blood pressure and infection.
“It’s incredibly exciting to see innovative companies developing devices that are more accessible and easier to use and detect high-risk conditions,” Greenleaf said. “It’s laudable that all the companies attempt to work on problems and have innovative ways to detect and diagnose the problems earlier,” he said.
“Having more diagnostic tools not just in hospitals, [but] at home or in more areas that do not have an academic medical center, could help improve maternity mortality.”
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