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Each year, one million people receive chemotherapy in the United States alone. Cancer remains the leading cause of death worldwide, accounting for 10 million deaths in 2020.

The importance of cancer and finding solutions to improve treatment strategies has inspired a group of MIT researchers to develop a wearable monitor that is designed to help patients track their white blood cell counts.

According to the researchers, this could “eliminate 50 percent of hospitalizations” for cancer cases.

What is Leuko Labs?

Leuko Labs originated several years ago in the Madrid-MIT M+ Vision Consortium (MIT linQ), an initiative that promotes medical entrepreneurship by connecting promising researchers with MIT faculty to address critical gaps in the field.

With the support of this exciting commercial initiative, Leuko’s founders focused on a major challenge in cancer treatment: the only method of tracking white blood cell counts is through blood sampling, which is not ideal.

The problem with chemotherapy

About every 21 days, cancer patients undergo chemotherapy, which lowers their white blood cell count and increases their vulnerability to infection. Leuko co-founder Carlos Castro-Gonzalez highlighted the alarming rates and risks.

“One in six cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy will develop an infection where their white blood cells are critically low,” he said. “Some of these infections unfortunately end in death for the patients, which is particularly terrible because they are due to the treatment, not the disease.”

Many of the infections that occur in chemotherapy patients in the United States annually could be prevented simply by monitoring white blood cell counts. Levels usually recover, but doctors currently have no system for accurately assessing these levels before and after treatment.

With such a significant need, Leuko has developed a non-invasive solution that will allow patients to check their white blood cell counts more frequently, leading to greater precision in chemotherapy doses.

During his clinical rotations, Castro-Gonzalez discovered that many patients could tolerate higher doses of chemotherapy, which initially led him to MIT’s LINQ Health Innovation Program.

The benefits of these advances in healthcare could impact millions of people worldwide undergoing cancer treatment. “Studies show that this will eliminate 50 percent of hospitalizations,” Aurélien Bourquard, co-founder of Leuko, told MIT.

PointCheck checks the number of white blood cells through the nail

Resembling a futuristic fingerprint scanner, PointCheck is an optics-based device, according to MIT An innovation office “that can see through the skin and count white blood cells as they pass through a tiny lens.”

The capillaries at the base of the nail are so narrow and close to the skin that white blood cells must pass one by one, making them easier to detect.

MIT explains that while the device can’t provide an exact count, it can determine whether patients fall above or below the dangerous threshold of 500 neutrophils, the most common type of white blood cell.

In the future, Leuko Labs plans to branch out into measuring other blood components. But first, they must go through a rigorous FDA approval process.

For now, PointCheck remains a research device. They have been developing the product for the past four years, culminating in a study that will be presented to the FDA this year. Their studies so far show tremendous promise. A previous study published in Scientific reports showed that their device was 95% accurate.

For both patients and doctors, PointCheck can significantly improve existing cancer treatment systems and reduce the major complications that come with the world’s most common disease.