Heart and Vascular
Sapere Bio is developing a series of products to optimize critical treatment decisions for patients with heart and vascular disease, beginning with those that require cardiac surgery and other interventions that put them at-risk of treatment-related adverse events, prolonged recovery, and long-term compromise.
AKI-Sapere
AKI-Sapere is a pre-operative blood test that uses senescence to stratify patients by risk of acute kidney injury (AKI) before cardiac surgery.
Unpredictable kidney injury
30% of cardiac surgery patients experience AKI with devastating consequences.
Surgeons cannot predict which patients are vulnerable based on common clinical variables
(sCr, eGFR, diabetes, age).
AKI interventions are limited and applied post-op, long after injury.
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Preventable with AKI-Sapere
80% of AKI cases can be predicted before surgery.
Pre- and intra-operative interventions can prevent or reduce the severity of AKI.
Patients, physicians, and hospitals benefit from better surgical outcomes.
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Studied at leading cardiovascular centers
Based on rigorous, prospective clinical studies
Although our technology addresses the whole-body milieu and has applications throughout medicine, our products (predictive senescence-based algorithms) are derived from rigorous clinical studies and optimized for specific clinical decision points.
Discovered at Duke and
Johns Hopkins
The predictive value of senescence in cardiac surgery was discovered in a real-world, observational study at Johns Hopkins and Duke.
Multi-Center Validation Study Ongoing
A large clinical validation study, GUARD-AKI, is ongoing at Johns Hopkins, WakeMed Heart and Vascular, and Hoag Memorial Hospital with completion expected in early 2022.
Surpassing standards
AKI-Sapere demonstrates the clinical power of senescence biomarkers in cardiac surgery.
In Sapere Bio's real-world, observational discovery study, only 15% of patients who eventually developed AKI were identifiable pre-operatively as high-risk (<5% of all patients) through elevated baseline serum creatinine. Other common clinical risk factors such as age, eGFR, and diabetes yielded similarly poor results. Likewise, common renal biomarkers (sCysC, KIM-1, TIMP-2, L-FABP1, albumin, B2M, NGAL, OPN, UMOD) did not predict AKI before surgery. But with AKI-Sapere and novel biomarkers of senescence and aging, clinicians will be able to identify 80% of at-risk patients and target early interventions to prevent AKI.
What the Experts Say
“The risk is in the patient but known risk factors are worthless. I played a game and tried to guess which patients would develop AKI and I was wrong all the time”
(Cardiac Surgeon and ERAS Cardiac Executive Committee Member)
“Renal insufficiency is probably one of the highest risk things in our patients. We all have tremendous respect for - or fear almost - of renal insufficiency” (Cardiac Surgeon)
“If there were a test that would allow us to know that certain patients really were at very high risk for renal failure, yeah, we would try to do a lot of things differently than we might normally do... I would definitely use it” (Cardiac Surgeon)
Heart and Vascular Pipeline
A primary role for senescence in AKI prediction is further supported by pilot data in patients undergoing cardiac catheterization. Beyond AKI, senescence correlates with less common adverse events after cardiac surgery like MACE as well as other inflammatory phenotypes and microvascular disease. Future interventional studies will explore additional outcomes of clinical and economic relevance, including hospital length of stay.
