Cardiologist-Founded PAC Dynamic Wins $150K for Tool to Personalize Patient Care

PAC Dynamic Founder and CEO Jonathan Grinstein, an associate professor of medicine at the University of Chicago School of Medicine, is a highly respected cardiologist specializing in the medical management of advanced heart failure.

A heart failure doctor at the University of Chicago Medicine, Jonathan Grinstein founded PAC Dynamic to personalize patient care.

Managed by the Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, the George Shultz Innovation Fund recently awarded a $150,000 co-investment to the startup, which was among three teams in this year’s finals.

Director of Mechanical Circulatory Support and Director of Research for the Advanced Heart Failure Group at the University of Chicago, Founder and CEO Jonathan Grinstein’s research focuses on better understanding the role that hemodynamics – the way that blood flows through the body – and cardiac energetics play in identifying patients in need of advanced therapies.

Currently, there is a significant gap between the number of patients who need heart replacement therapy and those that actually receive this care. “Our field has been trying for decades to bridge that gap,” Grinstein said. The challenge is that the tools used to objectively asses how sick a patient is are unreliable.

“We have a lot of subjective clues, but not objective tools,” he added, noting that many of the currently available options are more than 25 years old and were studied during an era of medicine that is no longer relevant.

Now, using computational modeling and artificial intelligence together with a patient’s unique hemometabolic profile, PAC Dynamic’s proprietary algorithm can model the anticipated response of a patient to medications and support devices. This enables patients to be matched with the optimal therapy at the optimal time – risk stratifying patients at a level previously not possible.

“We can give the answer of how sick the patient is accurately, timely, and with data points that anyone can take,” said Grinstein.

The model draws on patient-specific information, rather than general population-level data, and can be used by anyone, in any hospital, as it doesn’t require sophisticated equipment. “Our tool moves away from subjective data points and applies the patient-specific tipping point at which heart energies are untenable and the only option is replacement,” added Grinstein.

The aim for 2025 is to bring the tool to clinicians through integration with various electronic health record platforms. Investment from the Innovation Fund will be used to hire a full-time engineer to accelerate production and finalize the product. It also will support development of an automatic waveform analyzer for smart care delivery as the startup looks to add additional capabilities.

“The goal is to ultimately apply our algorithms to existing implantable and wearable hemodynamic monitors. To do so, we would have to extract the key information we need for our algorithms from the pressure tracings directly,” said Grinstein.

As he explained, information from these monitors would be automatically analyzed, incorporated into the algorithm, and fed to different medical devices or drug delivery systems that could then respond in real-time directly to patient needs.

Such additional capabilities and more were among the ideas Grinstein, who had no business background before founding PAC Dynamics, brought to the Polsky Center to further explore. With research collaborator Mark Belkin, assistant professor of medicine at UChicago, he presented at the fall 2023 Collaboratorium and connected with Chicago Booth MBA candidate Zain Shaikh. The team then went on to participate in the Polsky Center’s I-Corps program before applying to the George Shultz Innovation Fund.

The Innovation Fund co-invests in early-stage tech ventures coming out of the University of Chicago, Argonne National Laboratory, Fermilab, and the Marine Biological Laboratory. The core mission is to help scientific founders turn their innovations into ventures that advance cutting-edge technologies, generate significant financial returns, and create lasting impact for humankind.

To date, the Innovation Fund has invested over $9 million in more than 90 companies that have gone on to raise more than $412 million in follow-on funding. Companies launched with the fund’s support include Onchilles Pharma, ExplORer Surgical, ClostraBio, Esya Labs, and Super.Tech.