Further landmark evidence released to showcase the ability of Nightingale Health’s technology to predict hundreds of diseases from a single blood sample
Press release, 14 June 2022 at 9:20 a.m. (EEST)
Nightingale Health Plc (“Nightingale Health”) announced today that its proprietary blood-testing technology has been used to conduct the largest scientific study of its kind showing the technology’s capability to predict hundreds of diseases from a single blood sample. The research, described in a new pre-print, is an important milestone in international efforts to realize the desperately needed benefits of preventative health to manage the massive cost and inequality challenges of current worldwide healthcare systems.
Nightingale Health’s technology brings a more holistic prediction capability and stronger validation than any other blood-testing technology with an affordable price point, enabling preventative health applications from nationwide screening to personalized health. Empowering people with better understanding of their future health is the fundamental building block for individual-level preventative actions and any mass-scale prevention program aiming to help people live healthy longer.
In the study announced today, the future risk of getting hundreds of diseases was shown to be associated with the levels of dozens of blood biomarkers measured from samples taken from 150,000 healthy individuals from the UK (UK Biobank) and Finland (Finnish National Biobank) with Nightingale Health’s proprietary blood-testing technology. The technology provides a holistic biomarker panel for each sample that captures diverse metabolic functions in the human body. The biomarker values in the panel were connected to information on what diseases the sample donors developed in the decade after giving the blood sample, revealing the linkage between the biomarker panel measured by Nightingale Health’s technology and future health outcomes.
The scientific analyses uncovered surprising relationships between biomarker levels and immunity, mind health, lung health, and many other health areas, demonstrating how Nightingale Health’s biomarkers can broadly capture overall health status.
As in many earlier studies and regulatory validation processes, the biomarker data provided by Nightingale Health’s technology passed all the pre-specified quality metrics agreed with the UK Biobank, as assessed by blind duplicate samples. This is a further demonstration of the performance of the technology: unprecedented scale coupled with clinical levels of accuracy.
While studies with Nightingale Health’s technology have previously focused on “metabolic diseases”, the new research shows that Nightingale Health’s blood biomarkers are relevant for almost all areas of medicine and can act as predictors of future disease onset for many other diseases from a single measurement.
Moreover, with Nightingale Health’s technology, the opportunity to uncover health and disease goes beyond single biomarker associations. Since the entire biomarker panel is measured in one go from each blood sample, and most diseases are associated with a diverse set of biomarkers, the most appealing opportunity is to combine several biomarkers to improve prediction. This approach is already applied in many commercial offerings of Nightingale Health.
For example, Nightingale Health’s technology used to conduct the landmark study is already available directly to consumers via Livit by Nightingale Health. Livit can reach a nearly unlimited pool of customers since the test is run from a finger-prick blood sample drawn at home by an individual. The first version of Livit, currently available, includes four health areas (heart, metabolism, immunity, and mind), and the service will be expanded with many more, supported by the study announced today. Livit is available in Finland and later in the year in Sweden, Germany, and the UK.
In addition to Livit, Nightingale Health’s technology is currently available in a private healthcare setting in Finland, preventative occupational health settings in Japan, and an ongoing significant public health initiative in Estonia. Because the same technology platform is running in all of the settings mentioned above, the scientific discoveries in this study can be translated to benefit all users of the technology, promoting preventative health worldwide.
Nightingale Health’s strategy has since the beginning been to transparently validate the technology, openly collaborate with the medical science community, and bring impactful products to the world. Therefore, Nightingale Health has released the full range of relationships between hundreds of diseases and all Nightingale Health biomarkers via a free webtool. Furthermore, the underlying data have been made freely available to researchers working with the UK Biobank. Many scientists around the world are already using this treasure trove of Nightingale Health’s biomarker data, and their studies are continuously uncovering new applications based on Nightingale Health’s technology. The amount of data is expected to grow rapidly as Nightingale Health continues the blood sample analysis of the entire 500,000 samples in the UK Biobank.
“Our vision is to empower people with a better understanding of their health and give everyone an opportunity to live healthy longer. The comprehensive study announced today again validates that a single blood test can holistically capture the overall health state and early risks for hundreds of individual diseases, and that Nightingale Health’s test can be run mass-scale with clinical grade quality. I’m very proud of this landmark achievement as it paves the way for preventative health applications from nationwide screening to personalized health,” says Teemu Suna, CEO and co-founder of Nightingale Health.
Released materials:
Pre-print: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.06.13.22276332v1
Free webtool: https://nightingalehealth.com/atlas
For further information, please contact:
Teemu Suna, CEO
About Nightingale Health
Nightingale Health is The Preventative Health Company. Staying healthy is one of the top priorities in human life. Our health has a profound impact on our quality of life, and it’s also strongly connected to the lives of those close to us. Nightingale Health enables prevention by combining the power of our in-house developed, advanced blood analysis technology with unprecedented access to global health repositories and world-leading medical research. With this combination, we go beyond the traditional healthcare and wellbeing tools: We provide the scientific connection to multiple health and disease outcomes and the ability to predict future healthy years.
