Having recently announced the formation of our advisory board we wanted to take some time to introduce its initial members.
First things first: a little bit about Kalium Health
Our founding team came together in 2018 having spotted an opportunity to improve the lives of people living with kidney disease and related conditions. What started as a shared passion became a clear mission to provide patient-centric monitoring of key health markers, starting with abnormal blood potassium levels which impact patients' lives tremendously and cause avoidable deaths.
To help us advance towards this goal we looked around for advice and were fortunate to find fantastic support from many clinicians and industry experts, including those mentioned below.
The benefits our advisors bring
As a relatively small core team we wanted to bring in external input that would help us maximise the opportunities ahead of us and avoid mistakes as far as possible. This includes ensuring that we are building the right product to best serve the needs of stakeholders including patients, physicians and healthcare systems, as well as building it in the right way to reduce time to market.
It was also important to us that we attract people who share our values of care, creativity, integrity, respect and teamwork. This goes for anyone we work with but is especially important when it comes to strategic issues that influence the direction of company.
Expert clinical advisors
Whilst our founding Chief Medical Officer, Prof Fiona Karet, is the source of our clinical innovation, it is important that we hear first-hand from other clinical disciplines and different geographies to broaden the applicability of our products. Therefore we are delighted to welcome Drs Finkelstein and Frankel to our team.
Dr Fredric Finkelstein has been working in nephrology in New Haven since coming to Yale as a Fellow in 1971. He is Clinical Professor of Medicine at Yale University and is a past Chair of the CME Program for the International Society of Nephrology. Dr Finkelstein has been working over the last 10 years to coordinate the planning, development, and organization of acute kidney injury and dialysis services in developing countries and has received several awards including the J. Michael Lazarus Distinguished Award from The National Kidney Foundation, the Karl Nolph Lifetime Achievement Award in Peritoneal Dialysis and the Oreopolous Award from the International Society of Peritoneal Dialysis.
Dr Andrew Frankel has been a consultant nephrologist at Imperial College Healthcare NHS trust since 1995. He has experience in managing all aspects of kidney disease and has played a significant role in the development of national guidelines on the management of diabetes in the context of kidney disease. In addition, he was the joint editor of the UK Kidney Association guidelines on the use of SGLT2I in adults with chronic kidney disease.
Directly applicable industry expertise
Before we formed Kalium Health the only way we could find to measure blood potassium levels while out and about was using the Abbott i-STAT. This is a professional-grade, multi-analyte device not intended for self-testing but it nevertheless showed us that we could develop our own technology to be smaller and lower-cost with the benefit of recent manufacturing advances and some invention on our part. The i-STAT was developed under the leadership of Bill Moffitt, who took i-STAT Corporation public before its eventual successful acquisition by Abbott Labs.
We were introduced to Bill through a mutual connection and from an early meeting in Cambridge he has continued to provide unique industry insight that gives us valuable knowledge in exactly our field. Along with currently serving on the boards of several life science companies, including four as Chair, Bill has been President and CEO of Nanosphere and a Board Director at Base4 Innovation, Momentum Bioscience and other medical technology innovators.
Company building for growth
As Kalium Health grows and enters the commercial stage we will continue to develop our team to ensure we maintain world-class capabilities and experience in patient-centric healthcare.
Alongside our named advisors we are fortunate and thankful to receive support from countless experienced company-builders, physicians and patients themselves for whom the products we are developing will have great impact.
Read more about our leadership here: https://www.kaliumhealth.com/leadership
