Asthma sufferers can now track inhaler use with an app, which also gathers information about communities that are asthma “hot spots.”
About 15 years ago, David Van Sickle worked for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as a “disease detective,” looking for the preliminary signs of epidemics. That’s when he became fascinated with the curious case of a community-wide asthma attack in Barcelona, Spain.
Starting around 1980, there were reports of hospital emergency rooms being overwhelmed with patients suffering from severe respiratory problems, but the source of the reactions was a mystery for several years.
Van Sickle: Asthma is “a really interesting puzzle.”
“They finally identified that people were having symptoms in this particular area of the city because of exposure to soybean dust being put into silos,” says Van Sickle. “They didn’t have proper filters on the silos, and when they were loading and unloading soybeans in the harbor it would release these clouds of soybean dust, which is a potent asthmagen that had never been identified.
“It took bringing people in and asking them where they were when their attack began,” he continues, “then marking that on a map to figure out what was happening.”
That was Van Sickle’s first exposure to the potential of using big data to track and treat asthma, which eventually led to him co-founding Madison-based Propeller Health. Today, as the company’s CEO, he strives to simplify and personalize the treatment of chronic respiratory disease by making sensors that attach to inhalers and track their use.
Since Van Sickle launched Propeller Health with Greg Tracy and serial entrepreneur Mark Gehring in 2010, the company has grown to more than 100 employees, including a handful abroad, with an office in the US Bank Plaza building on South Pinckney Street and another in San Francisco. Madison has proved an excellent base location, says Van Sickle, citing the city’s wealth of “experience, history and resources around health care and entrepreneurship.”
In December, Propeller Health was acquired by San Diego-based ResMed Inc. for $225 million, but will continue acting as a standalone business. Van Sickle is still the CEO.
He lives in Oregon, Wis., with his wife, three children, and gigantic Newfoundland dog, Martha. A longtime jazz drummer, he put his musical ambitions on hold to study medical anthropology as a graduate student at the University of Arizona-Tucson. He worked his way through grad school by helping out in the pediatrics department of the Asthma and Airway Disease Research Center, which led him to study asthma among the Navajo people in northern New Mexico and Native Alaskans living in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta.
“In all these different settings, asthma has a different phenotype,” Van Sickle says. “It’s not the same everywhere. … You see all these different communities trying to wrangle with it in their own way.”
Van Sickle studied asthma in India for his dissertation, finding himself fascinated again by the “nexus between lifestyle, diet, environment, care and treatment,” he says. “It was a really interesting puzzle for somebody interested in anthropology.”
The far-flung experiences made him realize how complicated it is for people to live with asthma day-to-day.
“These are not simple regimens people are on,” he says. “They’re generally on more than one inhaler, and they work differently mechanically and also in the body. It’s a disease that we have great treatments for, but we haven’t translated that into simple ways to apply them as a person.”
After completing a Ph.D. in medical anthropology, Van Sickle moved to Madison in 2006 for an intensive two-year population health program at the UW-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health. He set about capturing information about “where, when and among whom asthma was happening” by hooking up electronics to inhalers and building a surveillance system to track how often patients used them. It quickly became apparent that the data was valuable not only to public health systems investigating asthma “hot spots” in communities, but also for individual patients struggling to manage their symptoms.
“It turns out that how often a patient uses their inhaler is an indication of how well they’re doing,” he says. “If you’re taking a lot of medication at night, it’s a sign that your condition is worsening, it’s uncontrolled, and you’re at much higher risk of going to the ER with a severe attack.”
Van Sickle founded Propeller Health to make it easier for patients to manage their conditions, and to “make sense of all asthma happening in daily life around the world,” he says. Thanks to the deal with ResMed, which closed in January, his brainchild is one step closer to achieving that goal.
“We have a vision of quite a lot of expansion and growth,” he says. “We’re growing the commercial programs across the U.S. and hopefully bringing the benefits of digital medicines to a lot more people.”
[Editor's note: This article has been corrected to note that the ResMed deal closed in January, not in March.]
