Litmus Health

Litmus Health develops end-to-end infrastructure for clinical trial data capture, monitoring, and analysis, with a focus on wearables and sensor data. The company serves researchers conducting clinical trials and observational studies, primarily in oncology and complex chronic inflammatory diseases such as Crohn's disease, colitis, multiple sclerosis, Parkinson's disease, and rheumatoid arthritis. Its platform is designed to collect real-world patient data at the point of experience, position that data for analytics, and support the development of digital clinical trial endpoints.

Litmus Health was founded by an interdisciplinary team with backgrounds in healthcare, bioinformatics, medical informatics, and software engineering. The company's Chief Scientific Officer, Dr. Sam Volchenboum, has been appointed Chair of the Clinical Research Data Alliance. Litmus states that its core belief is that health-related quality of life is the ultimate clinical endpoint, and its work is oriented toward helping investigators and sponsors bring drugs and therapeutics to market more efficiently.

Core Platform Capabilities

• Collects data directly from hundreds of data sources, integrating multiple data sets and streams without manual wrangling.
• Provides iOS and Android patient apps that gather patient data and trigger validated survey questions based on protocol design, removing the need for custom app development.
• Study Hub module monitors study progress, alerts principal investigators, and visualizes population-level trends, with individual patient drill-down views and faceted search functionality.
• Litmus ML supports modeling and interoperates with external data science tools, enabling time series alignment, interpolation, and correlation analysis.
• The platform can be deployed in as little as four weeks.

Notable Study: Takeda and University of Chicago

• Takeda Pharmaceuticals and Dr. David Rubin's team at the University of Chicago are using Litmus Health in a 500-patient study conducted over three years, focused on Crohn's disease and colitis.
• The study gathers data from smartphones, electronic patient-reported outcomes (ePRO), and wearables to examine the relationship between sleep, activity, and disease flares in inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) patients.
• Initial results have demonstrated the potential to inform patient disease monitoring and management strategies.
• Dr. Rubin's team and Litmus are developing predictive models for IBD flares based on heart rate, sleep, and physical activity data.

Published Research

• Wearable Devices Can Predict Disease Activity in Inflammatory Bowel Disease Patients — authored by researchers from the Inflammatory Bowel Disease Center at the University of Chicago Medicine and Litmus Health. The study demonstrated for the first time the use of passive biosensor data to predict elevated biomarkers of inflammation (C-reactive protein and faecal calprotectin) in IBD patients.
• Use of Wearable, Mobile, and Sensor Technology in Cancer Clinical Trials — published in JCO Clinical Cancer Informatics by Suzanne M. Cox, Ashley Lane, and Samuel L. Volchenboum. The paper reviews the landscape of mobile health (mHealth) technology options for clinical trials, discusses data accuracy, provenance, and regulatory considerations, and outlines next steps for establishing mHealth as a legitimate measure in oncology trials, including FDA regulatory definition, security standards, and creation of feedback loops between researchers and regulators.

Executive Team

• Daphne Kis, Co-Founder (Business and Operations) — previously served as CEO of EDventure Holdings for nearly twenty years, publishing technology trend reports and producing the PC Forum conference. She has invested in several health-related startups and serves on the board of WorldQuant University.
• Sam Volchenboum, MD, PhD, Co-Founder and Chief Medical Officer — directs the Center for Research Informatics, holds a master's in informatics from MIT and a PhD from Mayo Clinic, and has approximately 20 years of experience as a practicing pediatric oncologist. He founded Litmus to combine clinical research expertise with medical informatics.
• Josh Jones-Dilworth, Co-Founder (Sales and Marketing) — brings 15 years of sales, marketing, and business development experience, including work with Merck and Pfizer, and has helped bring more than 150 emerging technology companies to market. He also teaches in the MBA Entrepreneurship program at the Acton School of Business.
• Dominiek Ter Heide, Chief Technology Officer — holds 19 patents (12 granted, 7 pending), has more than 15 years of full-stack software engineering experience, and has spent seven years scaling big data systems and building enterprise-grade stream processing platforms. He is responsible for the platform's architecture with respect to scientific rigor and regulatory oversight.

Deployment and Use Cases

• Litmus Health supports observational studies, therapeutic trials, and post-market research.
• The platform is positioned for use by pharmaceutical sponsors and academic research teams seeking to incorporate real-world wearables data into clinical studies.
• The company has published a Device Census Report specifically to guide pharmaceutical companies looking to incorporate real-world data from wearables.
• Data engineering is described as central to the platform's value proposition, with an emphasis on data being properly positioned, well-stewarded, and fully auditable before any modeling work is undertaken.

Litmus Health operates at the intersection of clinical research, medical informatics, and machine learning, working directly with researchers and project leads across pharmaceutical and academic settings. The company's advisory board includes leaders in clinical development and computer science, and it maintains partnerships with external organizations in the life sciences research space.