CASE 03 · KUMA HEALTHCASE 03 · KUMA HEALTH · LONDON
Autoimmune disease is unpredictable. Care shouldn't be.
CONTEXT
More than one in ten people live with an autoimmune condition. Flares are unpredictable, self-tracking is fragmented, and almost no usable data exists between clinic visits. For someone like Sarah, who lives with Crohn's disease, that means hours spent tracking symptoms, getting lost between appointments, and the constant fear of losing control.
SARAH'S JOURNEY
The story we used to explain Kuma: twelve moments in which early signals, an AI coach and a remote care team turn an unpredictable flare into a managed one.
THE IDEA
Kuma is the first companion for people with autoimmune disease to gain control and clarity along their journey: a companion app for patients, a dashboard for clinicians and a research interface, bringing together wearables, health records and biomarker data so AI can help identify triggers, anticipate flares and personalise management. Patients gain control; researchers gain consistent, high-quality real-world data to support the discovery of digital biomarkers. The beachhead: lupus, with a research pilot at King's College London.
BUILDING IT
Selected from over a thousand.
We founded Kuma through Zinc's venture builder after a competitive selection of more than a thousand applicants. As Chief Medical and Product Officer, I took the product from zero to one, from concept to production.
Research at the source.
I led research with more than 100 patients and specialists, translating behavioural and clinical signals into a personalisation engine for autoimmune care.
Evidence and safety, early.
I defined the clinical safety and evidence strategy from the start, so regulatory alignment and clinical validation were designed in rather than retrofitted.
Partners for proof.
Partnerships with King's College London, US academic medical centres and Dr Chris Wincup, a rheumatologist specialising in lupus, anchored the work in real clinical settings. We were also in advanced discussions with the Lupus Center at UMass for a research pilot.
A companion, with guardrails.
I built a lifestyle-advice assistant grounded in more than 3,000 recent journal articles and abstracts on lupus, rheumatoid arthritis and Crohn's disease, with dedicated references governing its tone and its guardrails.
THE PRODUCT
THE BRAND
"It doesn't feel like a medical app."
I designed the entire brand: name, logo, palette and website. Kuma is Japanese for bear, chosen for the hibernation cycle as a metaphor for flares and remissions: strong, but reassuring. The aesthetic is deliberately warm and non-clinical, which is exactly what users told us back.
- CORAL · #FF8E61
- INDIGO · #2E2E41
- ORANGE · #FF9252
- LIGHT ORANGE · #FFAB7A
REFLECTION
Kuma taught me what only founding teaches: a venture is a design project in which every layer (evidence, brand, safety and story) has to hold together at once. It remains the clearest expression of my thesis that care for chronic, unpredictable conditions must be continuous, personal and quietly intelligent.