Country: Canada
What infection type does your test focus on? Upper Respiratory Tract Infections / Pharyngitis
What does your test detect? Pathogen(s)
About the Team:
Peter Whitehead is an inventor, entrepreneur, company builder and thought leader in the North American photonics-based medical device industry. Whitehead is the inventor of the VELscope Vx, a market-dominating oral cancer and oral disease visualisation and assessment system. The VELscope has been utilised in more than 50-million clinical examinations around the world, and is a five-time winner of the American Dental Association’s ‘Best of Class’ Technology Award.
Whitehead and his team are currently developing ‘Strepic’ and ‘Strepic Pro’, consumer and professional devices that use multiple wavelengths of light, backed by advanced Artificial Intelligence, to determine the presence or absence of streptococcal throat infections. The Strepic devices will be rapid (results in less than a minute) handheld, affordable, minimally invasive, point-of-care and simple to use. Based on initial testing, the company hopes to create a device that is 20 times more accurate than a trained clinician. By differentiating between viral and bacterial pharyngitis, Strepic has the potential to become an important device for patient management, and for the stewardship of antibiotic resources.
To develop the Strepic device, Whitehead has created a BC-based company: Light.AI. Light.AI is currently partnered with the Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences, University of Oxford, to continue the development of the AI algorithm, and with more than 10 Tier 1 institutions in North America that are helping Light.AI expand its pharyngitis database.
