ResApp Health Limited (ASX:RAP) Managing Director & CEO, Dr Tony Keating, discusses the path to commercialising its smartphone app, which diagnoses respiratory diseasesResApp Health Limited
(ASX:RAP) is developing an app for diagnosing and managing respiratory diseases, such as pneumonia, bronchiolitis, croup, asthma. Our focus has been primarily taking our technology, which was originally developed at the University of Queensland, and pushing it through clinical trials and the regulatory pathway, to get it approved. Our end goal is to provide a diagnostic tool, alongside a telehealth consultation, so that a doctor performing telehealth consultation can make an accurate diagnosis of a patient, who might have pneumonia or asthma.
So the app itself is quite simple. It listens to the sound of a patient’s cough and then it looks for signatures inside that sound, and matches those signatures to disease. Think of how speech recognition works. It listens to your speech, matches your speech patterns to text. Or how Shazam works, it listens for signatures in music and matches those signatures to artist and title.
Our focus right now is submitting to the FDA by the end of the second quarter 2017. We’re currently running a large scale US clinical study to provide the data for that submission. We hope that by the end of 2017, we’ll have marketing entry for the app in the US. We have $12 million in the bank at the moment. Our current cash burn rate is about $2 million a quarter. And we expect that cash to last us all the way through to FDA approval and market entry.
In terms of revenue, we’re looking for revenue from telehealth companies on FDA approval, which should be by the end of 2017. Over the next six months, we hope to complete a very successful US clinical study and follow that with a submission to the FDA. We’re also now scaling up the business on the commercial side with more discussions with potential partners, such as telehealth providers. Our final aim for the company is to provide an accurate diagnostic test, of every single doctor visit that’s associated with respiratory disease.
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