Lactate is a single chemical that tells us whether our cells and organs are getting enough oxygen. It has numerous clinical applications including childbirth, sepsis, critical care, and surgical and cardiovascular care.
We started in childbirth because it's where the need is the greatest, despite labour being the most difficult environment for a continuous lactate biosensor to work. In our First-in-Fetus clinical trial, we demonstrated our technology can overcome this difficult environment, with high accuracy and without the need to calibrate.
A sensor that works there can work in many other places.
Sepsis already runs on lactate: International sepsis guidelines recommend measuring blood lactate in suspected sepsis and measuring it again if it's raised, because rising lactate signals that organs aren't getting enough oxygen. In practice that means a blood draw every few hours, and deterioration in between can go unseen. A continuous sensor turns that handful of snapshots into a live trend.
Starting with newborns: In November 2025, the Western Australian Government's Future Health Research and Innovation Fund awarded VitalTrace $500,000 to adapt our continuous lactate technology for neonatal intensive care. Raised lactate is an early indicator of neonatal sepsis, and newborns are among the hardest patients to draw repeated blood from.
Then adults: The same chemistry applies in the ICU, after cardiac surgery and in patients discharged home after a serious illness. Each new indication needs its own regulatory clearance, but it uses the same sensor, the same manufacturing line and the same data platform.
Every new indication also adds a new clinical episode to our dataset: the hours before deterioration, captured continuously.