Cough-based respiratory diagnostic app brings $180 million windfall for Aussie researchers

Research

28 Sep 2022

Dr Udantha Abeyratne

An Australian-developed smartphone app that can identify respiratory diseases such as COPD and COVID-19 based on cough sounds has been sold to pharma company Pfizer for $179 million.

The ResApp technology developed by Associate Professor Udantha Abeyratne and his team at University of Queensland’s School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering records a patient’s cough on a smartphone and analyses sounds and simple symptoms to diagnose and measure the severity of a range of respiratory diseases such as asthma, pneumonia, bronchiolitis, croup and COPD.

ResApp has recently reported positive results as COVID-19 screening test, and if validated could open the way for the technology to potentially reduce the number of PCR and rapid antigen tests used to detect COVID-19.

“We worked closely with paediatricians and respiratory physicians to develop the diagnostic technology,” Dr Abeyratne said.

The concept was originally developed to analyse snore sounds in patients with sleep apnoea, after which Dr Abeyratne  and co-researchers saw the potential for sound recordings to be used to diagnose other respiratory conditions.

“We wanted to identify the characteristics of various types of coughs,” he told Australia Unlimited in 2015.

“For instance, in pneumonia the tiny air sacs in the lung are filled with fluids, which has an identifiable impact on the airflow while breathing, the velocity of the air that is expelled during coughing, and the nature of sounds that cough makes. In asthma, tiny airways are inflamed thus obstructing airflow and changing the nature of a cough.”

“What we did was to develop mathematical features that can capture such changes and train a machine classifier to categorise coughs. Our methods can also use easy to obtain information such as fever, breathing rate and the existence of runny nose.”

UQ’s commercialisation company UniQuest licensed the app technology to Brisbane-based startup ResApp Health Limited in 2014, and now Pfizer has acquired the company for $179 million.

UQ Vice-Chancellor Professor Deborah Terry said the acquisition was an outstanding outcome for the company, the University and the researchers.

“The value of translating research into new point of care diagnostics to improve healthcare on a global scale cannot be understated,” she said.

The ResAppDx acute respiratory diagnostic test is approved by the TGA in Australia as a Class 2a medical device and is available to smartphone users via the Apple App store and Google Play.

It  was recently been incorporated in to the Doctors on Demand’s online telehealth platform in Australia.

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