The pharmaceutical giant Pfizer bought the Australian startup ResApp for $115 million, a company that developed an app to identify COVID-19 from a cough.
For about ten years the company had been developing an algorithm that diagnoses respiratory illnesses. However, in 2020 the startup pivoted to recognizing COVID-19 using cough-analysis technology.
According to the developers, the algorithm’s diagnostic accuracy reaches 92%. In testing the system also recorded 80% specificity. This means that only two in ten people screened received false-positive results.
A Pfizer spokesman said that the developers’ achievements are encouraging, and the deal expands the company’s presence in digital health.
“We believe that the COVID-19 screening tool is the next step that could potentially provide consumers with new solutions aimed at fighting the disease,” the company said.
The ResApp team hopes the acquisition will help the technology evolve and be widely deployed in remote parts of the world. According to the system’s developer Udanta Abeyratne, accessibility of screening was the project’s original aim.
“From the very beginning I had a strong vision of developing scalable and affordable technologies for diagnosing lung diseases worldwide […]. I hope that they will be able to detect deadly diseases, such as pneumonia, in very remote areas of Africa and Asia that lack access to modern hospitals,” she said.
Pfizer first signaled its desire to acquire ResApp for $65 million in 2020, immediately after a report was published. But the parties did not reach an agreement at that time.
As noted in March 2022, Pfizer discussed AI’s contribution to the development of a vaccine and a treatment for COVID-19.
In the spring of 2021, researchers at the University of Essex presented an algorithm that detects coronavirus from a patient’s cough. According to the developers, the algorithm’s accuracy reached 98%.
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