Inside Canary Biosensors’ Bet on Preventive Kidney Care

Harsha Vardhan

July 11, 2025

On World Kidney Day, experts sounded the alarm over the rapid rise of chronic kidney disease in India, which now affects nearly 17% of the population, according to a report in ET HealthWorld. The condition is often diagnosed late, with most patients seeking care only after significant and irreversible damage has already occurred due to poor awareness and a lack of early screening.

“I realised the real problem in India isn’t hospitals or treatment, but diagnosis and tracking. Diseases are rarely caught early, and even after diagnosis, monitoring systems are poor,” says Kaushik Suresh, CEO and founder of Canary Biosensors.

What began as a college project has since evolved into Canary Biosensors, a healthtech company co-founded by Kaushik Suresh and Amar Vignesh in 2020 the company is building a new category of diagnostic and monitoring tools for kidney disease monitoring that includes Crea Detect, a portable blood test for measuring creatinine levels, CanaryDx, a wearable biosensor, and CanaryCare, an AI layer that predicts hospitalization risk. Based in Chennai and operating out of the IIT Madras incubation cell, the team currently running clinical validations and pilot trials, with plans to first scale in the U.S. market before bringing the platform to India.

Identifying the Diagnosis Gap in Kidney Care

Kaushik was introduced to entrepreneurship at IITM Kancheepuram, where the curriculum combined product design with real-world problem solving. As part of a course project, he chose to work on a challenge in healthcare.

“Health was an area I wanted to focus on because I kept hearing stories of relatives and neighbours dealing with chronic illnesses, and watched their conditions gradually worsen without intervention.”

While many solutions in India focused on diabetes, Kaushik stumbled upon a gap in the detection and diagnosis infrastructure for kidney conditions during his project. Most monitoring tools, he observed, were limited to diabetes like glucometers and CGMs while similar solutions for kidney health were almost non-existent.

Kaushik explains, “ It wasn’t the hospitals or the treatment that were the problem,” he said. “It was everything before and after. In India, people don’t get diagnosed early, and even after they do, the tracking ecosystem is really poor for chronic diseases. This was one of the starting problems that we took to solve in the second year of my college.”

What began as a diagnostic tool has now grown into a full-fledged monitoring platform, with a product line structured around screening, monitoring, and early intervention in kidney disease.

How a College Project Turned Into Three-Part Kidney Health Platform

Canary Biosensors initially began with a simple urine-based dipstick test that offered a rough indication of kidney disease, but the team soon shifted focus to a blood test built around creatinine detection, called CreaDetect, with cloud integration as he realised the earlier version flagged the problem too late to make any real difference.

Kaushik explains, “ Creatinine is the clinical gold standard for detecting kidney dysfunction, and the device is designed to deliver quick, reliable results. It includes cloud integration that pushes data directly into electronic health records and allows both patients and clinicians to track trends over time.”

As part of their upcoming roadmap, the team is developing CanaryDx a wearable chest patch to monitor fluid overload in kidney patients between dialysis sessions which would track biosignals like heart rate and ECG, paired with CanaryCare, an AI layer that combines this data with patient-reported inputs like weight and fatigue.

Kaushik explains, “We came across a problem where many patients face a high risk of hospitalization between dialysis sessions. The goal of both devices is to predict that risk, flag when early intervention is needed, and send alerts if fluid levels rise or if the heart shows signs of dysfunction.”

Crea Detect is currently in clinical testing, with trials for the wearable device expected to begin next month. Unlike software, where products are launched quickly and improved through real-time feedback, medical devices follow a far slower and more rigorous path.

Kaushik explains, “Medical device development must clear clinical evaluations, regulatory checks, and scalability hurdles before reaching the market. he said. “It takes years for a product to actually come to market because it requires extensive validation, regulatory approval, and scalability before release.”

Why Canary Is Betting on the US Healthcare Market First

Canary’s primary market focus is the remote care segment in the United States, where its products are designed not for individual patients directly, but for healthcare providers operating under value-based care models. The tools are intended to be deployed for remote patient monitoring, aiming to reduce hospital visits and associated costs.

“It’s intended to be more of a B2B play where providers adopt the hardware and software platform and implement it with their patients,” says Kaushik. “The devices and dashboard are used by clinicians to monitor patients remotely, while patients interact with the hardware from home. using the tools regularly as part of their care plan.”

Canary chose the US ecosystem because it is one of the few markets where remote care and outcome-based payment models are already established. In contrast, dialysis in India remains hospital-based and is paid for per visit. Pricing strategy was another factor, as FDA-approved devices in the US are seen as premium products and can command better pricing.

Providers in the US care about fewer hospital visits and better patient outcomes, and our product ranges were suited to that ecosystem, which is why we chose that market,” he says. “In India, where certification frameworks and reimbursement models are still evolving, the same device might be viewed more as a cost-sensitive solution, making it harder to scale initially.

Looking ahead, Kaushik believes the toughest challenge would arrive from clinical validation, especially for the wearable, as the device is designed to pick up biosignals that haven’t been tracked in this context before. To prove it works, they’ll need to run trials across geographies, age groups, and races, and build population-level calibration into the product.

He explains, “We’re collecting some first-of-its-kind biosignals,” he said. “We’ll have to test across patients, geographies, and races to make sure the product works for everyone.”

Where Canary Sees the Next Wave of Healthtech Innovation

One of the key differences Canary highlights is how healthcare moves at a fundamentally different pace from software. Unlike in tech, where products are launched quickly and improved through constant feedback, medical devices are expected to last for decades once approved making and future clinical relevance central to how products are designed in this space.

Kaushik explains, “We focus more on projecting where healthcare is headed and spoke to value-based care providers and clinicians while studying how systems have evolved over the past decade. Healthcare requires the devices to be built for decades down the line instead of the next release and the product has to reflect what would be essential in the future.

Canary sees this as another major gap in healthcare. The biggest opportunities, they believe, lie in systems that are broken and underserved, while cautioning against entering over-saturated verticals like diabetes, which already have a saturated stack.

Kaushik explains "While the problem isn’t gone, the bar for meaningful tech innovation has become much higher, and by contrast, kidney care still lacks that as pharma innovation is just beginning with it. So it’s the right time to enter because those shifts take six to seven years to play out.”

The second opportunity, Kaushik says, lies in modernising medical devices that still rely on outdated technology. Many systems in use today, including those from Abbott and Roche, as well as pacemakers and Holter monitors, were introduced more than a decade ago. He believes these tools can be rebuilt with modern components to deliver improved reliability, performance, and clinical value.

The final area Canary Biosensors is closely watching is AI. While adoption in healthcare has been slower than in other industries, the urgency is growing. AI brings with it the potential to automate repetitive tasks like documentation and patient screening, helping reduce the burden on healthcare workers and improve system efficiency. But unlike consumer applications, clinical use demands far higher standards.

“In healthcare, AI has potential, but it can’t afford to fail,” Karthik says. “Mistakes here have real consequences. That’s why validation takes time. But once it’s done right, you become one of the few with a clinically safe, regulated AI system and that’s a strong position to be in.”