Independent study: Nightingale Health’s blood test shown to enhance health check-ups by predicting many diseases at once
Press release, 7 October 2022 at 9:00 a.m. (EEST)
Ground-breaking research on over 100,000 people demonstrates that Nightingale Health Plc’s (“Nightingale Health”) blood test can identify early risk signs for many common diseases all at once in a cost-effective manner. The unique snapshot of a person’s health state captured by Nightingale Health’s proprietary metabolomic blood test was able to improve current health screening tools for several costly diseases, such as heart failure, dementia, and diabetes. The study was conducted by researchers from universities in Germany, the Netherlands, and the UK. The results were published in Nature Medicine, one of the world’s leading medical journals.
Disease prevention is an effective solution to reducing healthcare costs. The key is to identify who is at high risk and to target prevention to these people. Many new blood-testing technologies come with a promise to enhance personalized prevention, but few have been proven to add value in large studies of patients. The new study shows that Nightingale Health’s blood test is effective in identifying people at high risk, and it highlights the possibility of using the blood test in health check-ups. This paves way for a new kind of medicine: one that is not about waiting for people to get sick, but instead about enabling prevention before the onset of disease.
For several years, Nightingale Health has invested in population studies and large biobanks by measuring an unprecedented number of blood samples with its proprietary blood-testing technology. The big data generated from these measurements from hundreds of thousands of blood samples has been made accessible to the medical research community through the biobank collaborations. This bold approach allows scientists from across the globe to transparently validate the company’s blood-testing technology and to identify many new health applications that may benefit individuals and the entire healthcare ecosystem.
The fruits of Nightingale Health’s investments in medical data generation are not only pioneering science. The predictive blood test is already used by private healthcare partners in the Nordics and Japan. The company is bringing the benefits of multi-disease health screening to additional areas in healthcare. Nightingale Health’s personalized disease prevention platform can provide substantial value for corporate health, health insurance, health service providers, and public health since the entire ecosystem is looking at finding ways to help people stay healthy for longer. Prevention is critical because it helps increase the quality of life for individuals, but equally importantly, it also enables a novel way to optimize the use of healthcare resources in a more timely and effective manner.
The landmark research demonstrates how Nightingale Health’s medical data generation platform is laying the foundations for building a global preventive health system. And this is only the beginning of the company’s strategy to make big medical data available globally on an unprecedented scale. “The combination of Nightingale Health’s biomarker data and detailed medical records from more than a million samples from biobanks in the UK, Finland, Estonia, and Japan enable to prove the benefits of multi-disease health screening as part of regular health check-ups. We are pleased to have the scientific community openly scrutinize these claims and take the medical applications even further than previously envisioned,” says Teemu Suna, CEO and co-founder of Nightingale Health.
About the study
Buergel et al. Metabolomic profiles predict individual multidisease outcomes. Nature Medicine (2022). https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-022-01980-3
Layman summary of the article
Simultaneous prediction of risk for multiple common diseases using metabolomics. Nature Medicine (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-022-01992-z
From the editor: “An ambitious, large-scale study involving more than 100,000 people from the UK Biobank shows that profiling of metabolites can provide an integrated view of disease risk that has predictive value beyond established clinical risk predictors.” Editorial Team, Nature Medicine.
Expert opinion: “This study explores the predictive power of blood-derived metabolic markers measured on the Nightingale NMR platform on 24 common health-relevant conditions. It is based on data and samples from almost 118,000 individuals of the UK Biobank and highlights the potential of NMR-based metabolomics for individual health outcome prediction.” Karsten Suhre, Weill Cornell Medicine in Qatar, Doha, Qatar.
Press release by the researchers
From the press release: “To prevent diseases from occurring in the first place, it is important to identify those individuals who are at particularly high risk as early as possible. Yet current screening methods are often costly and focus only on one disease at a time. Scientists from the Berlin Institute of Health at Charité (BIH), Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, and University College London profiled 168 metabolic markers in the blood samples of over 100,000 people and combined this data with their medical histories. With the help of artificial intelligence, they were able to predict the risk of onset of several diseases with just one test and show where early intervention could be beneficial.”
For further information, please contact:
Teemu Suna, CEO
[email protected]
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.
