Resilient Lifescience is ready to start testing its wearable overdose detection device

Since its founding in 2021, Resilient Lifescience has gained attention around the Pittsburgh region for its mission to develop a wearable medical device to detect and reverse overdoses using naloxone.

Now, the Oakland-based medtech startup is ready to start testing its device, called the Resilient Monitor, on humans. Resilient Lifescience CEO and cofounder Brad Holden told Technical.ly that this marks a huge milestone because it enables the team to gather clinical evidence and learn what improvements they need to make to the technology.

It’s also a reflection of the engineers’ and researchers’ diligence, Holden said: “I think it speaks to the skill of our engineers that we put the time and the dedication in to get things right.”

Resilient Lifescience’s wearable patch can be worn on an individual’s abdomen and monitor their vitals. In the event of an overdose, it would automatically inject naloxone into their system. Looking back, Holden said, when the company started working on its prototype in November 2022, the device didn’t include the circuits the latest version has, nor the combination of microprocessors with sensors. After fine-tuning the electrical engineering side of things, Holden said, the company feels confident about its current prototypes.

“A lot of times, the first time you produce a PCB — a prototype batch — they don’t work at all, and you have to do a ton of troubleshooting,” Holden said. “But I think it speaks to the skill of our engineers [and] that we put the time and the dedication in to get things right. Actually, the first time we shipped our PCBs, that worked perfectly for us.”

Over the past year, the company has expanded its team with new hires and interns, including an algorithm engineer from Washington University and two interns from the University of Pittsburgh. Over the summer, the team also built the Emergency Response Program, which can alert family, friends, and first responders through phone calls or text messages. Additionally, the company has taken up office space at Carnegie Mellon University with the university’s Project Olympus incubator.

“It’s a great place to execute our feasibility study because we have access to folks that are at school at Carnegie Mellon University and in the University of Pittsburgh,” Holden said. “It’s been great to be a part of that community while we’re developing technology, and have the excitement of the folks in the academic world around us as we build out our device.”

Resilient Lifescience received $500,000 thanks to placing first in the Richard King Mellon Foundation’s Social-Impact Investment Pitch Competition in February 2023. The foundation’s director, Sam Reiman, said at the time that the company’s leaders were a part of “a new generation of compassionate entrepreneurs who are using their talents to create businesses designed to improve our communities.” The startup also raised $220,000 in April 2022.

At the moment, the company remains focused on its technology and business development, which the founders believe will put them in a good position to seek fundraising opportunities in 2024.

“A lot of what we’re going to be focused on is business development as well,” Holden said. “We’re really honing in on exactly the market that we plan to enter as our first beachhead market as we’ve launched the product and [are] building out as strong a pipeline there as possible. We believe now’s the right time to really focus on that.”

Atiya Irvin-Mitchell is a 2022-2024 corps member for Report for America, an initiative of The Groundtruth Project that pairs young journalists with local newsrooms. This position is supported by the Heinz Endowments.