Spotting metabolites
Guiding decision

Hyperkalemia is a common and potentially life-threatening metabolic imbalance that affects more than 50 million patients worldwide with chronic kidney disease, severe hypertension, heart failure or diabetes. It is also a silent threat that patients and physicians have good reason to fear.

Elevated serum potassium disrupts the electrical activity of neurons and muscle cells but most patients exhibit few or no specific symptoms until a medical emergency occurs, : such as a cardiac arrhythmia, that puts them at risk of sudden death.

Despite the clinical risk, a major diagnostic gap remains. Serum potassium levels can change within hours, making rapid assessment essential. However, standard blood tests are too slow to guide urgent clinical decisions and finger-prick sampling is prone to hemolysis, which can affect accuracy.

Today, dermal interstitial fluid - the fluid that fills the spaces between cells - is the next frontier in diagnostics.

Its composition closely mirrors that of blood plasma, it can be collected painlessly using tiny microneedles, providing direct access to molecular changes directly at the tissue level, where disease begins and therapy acts. However, ISF-based sensing has not yet entered routine clinical practice, and diagnostic devices capable of accurately measuring critical metabolites, such as potassium, are still in development.

ISF is not simply “cell-free blood.” It is a complex and highly dynamic environment, where metabolite concentrations are extremely low (just few millimoles) and ionic competition is intense. Ultimately, potassium measurement must not only correlate strongly with blood levels but also delivers absolute accuracy, because potassium values directly guide decision for at-risk patients.

In close partnership with the Fraunhofer Institute, KitechDx designs and develops a unique at-home wearable diagnostic system that combines analytical performance, robustness, ease of use for fragile patient populations and affordability for large-scale adoption.

KitechDx leverages an international network of leading academic and industrial partners spanning the entire value chain of ISF-based diagnostics, from research, development and industrialization to translational medicine.

The company has established a strategic alliance with the Fraunhofer IMM Institute in Mainz, a part of Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, the European leader in applied research. Together, they are working at the crossroads of biomedicine, microfluidics, bioanalysis, microelectronics, computing and systems engineering.