Refinement of a novel at-home kit for contact dermatitis testing and diagnosis.

ABSTRACT
Contact dermatitis affects up to 50% of the U.S. population. Contact dermatitis has significant health
repercussions and economic burden, accounting for more than 90% of occupational skin disorders, impacting
workplace productivity with an estimated annual cost of $1 billion, including $268 million due to lost workdays
and $141 million due to restricted activity days. Allergic contact dermatitis also significantly impacts quality of
life, as measured by DLQI and Skindex-16 indices.
Unfortunately, diagnostic testing for contact dermatitis is a complex, time-intensive process that is inaccessible
to many patients in need. The current gold standard is patch testing. This testing must be performed by a
dermatologist at a specialty clinic, which causes a barrier for patients in rural locations. Additionally, wait times
for visits often stretch across many months leaving patients with no immediate answers to their symptoms.
Patch testing also requires three clinic visits spread over five days. The time commitment is burdensome even
when patients live in close proximity to the clinic. For those that have to travel, testing can result in high
expenses for travel and hotels in addition to time missed at work. Finally, patch testing is a resource-heavy
task for providers and forces them to spend time that could otherwise be spent seeing more patients.
Alleviate’s solution is a novel testing platform that combines 1) a skin patch kit, 2) a patient and provider mobile
application, and 3) a cloud infrastructure. This novel telediagnostic approach will streamline patch testing,
gathering critical patient-provided data further optimizing patch testing through data science approaches. This
clinically-developed and tested workflow positions Alleviate with a first-of-its-kind, at-home, AI-powered patch
test, overcoming key limitations of the current approach. Alleviate has successfully established the foundational
assets to democratize skin patch te
sting. In the proposed Phase I effort, these assets will be refined through
additional development and verification in order to prepare the platform for commercialization.

Grant Number: 1R41AR086685-01
NIH Institute/Center: NIH
Principal Investigator: Charles Bruce