Tech-enabled transplant company CareDx has announced its plans to acquire Transplant Hero, the maker of an app that helps people receiving new organs remember to take their medication.

Currently, CareDx has its own app called AlloCare that is designed to help patients manage their health post-transplant. According to the company, Transplant Hero's tool will build out CareDx's cloud-based products, which cater to patients, dialysis providers and transplant centers.

Patients are able to use Transplant Hero to get alerts about when it's time to take their medication. Additionally, patients can log medication events and can earn digital awards for taking their medication on time.

Currently, Transplant Hero offers services for patients receiving a kidney, heart, lung, liver, pancreas and small bowel transplant.

WHY IT MATTERS

According to the CDC, on any given day there are 75,000 people waiting for organ transplants in the US. However, there are only about 8,000 deceased organ donors per year and 6,000 living donors per year.

After an organ transplant patients are typical prescribed an anti-rejection medicine. According to the Mayo Clinic, each patient can be impacted differently by the type of medication, dosage and side effects. Medication adherence is important after a transplant, according to the clinic, which notes the third major cause of transplant failure is not taking the anti-rejection medication properly.

Today several companies are looking into the adherence space. This M&A is looking to address medication management for these transplant patients.  

“CareDx and Transplant Hero are both dedicated to improving outcomes for transplant patients,” Reg Seeto, president and CEO of CareDx, said in a statement. “Transplant Hero’s easy-to-use interface and transplant focus allows us to expand into different organs. We will be able to leverage Transplant Hero’s well-established social media presence to augment AlloCare which has been built around patients from kidney transplant centers.”

THE LARGER TREND

With medication adherence being such a critical part of transplants, several companies have developed tools to help patients keep organized.

These digital efforts stretch back more than a decade. In 2021, the pediatric heart transplant program at New York-Presbyterian/Morgan Stanley Children's Hospital launched a one-year program that used a text messaging program to remind teams to take their transplant medication.

In 2017 Proteus, a digital pill company that has since dissolved, teamed up with Children's Health in Dallas to use an ingestible sensor embedded in a pill to record data about the adherence of pediatric transplant patients.