A good deal of disease diagnosis still begins with a doctor’s appointment, a blood requisition, a lab visit, and days spent waiting for results.
WearDOXX Founder and President Razieh Salahandish believes every added step is another opportunity for patients to delay care.
“Human nature seeks ease,” Salahandish said. “The balance of ease and efficiency is off when it comes to diagnosis.”
Razieh Salahandish,
“Society pays for the very ignorance in the healthcare system’s design.”
WearDOXX
Salahandish, who is also an Assistant Professor at York University’s Lassonde School of Engineering, likened the current diagnostic workflow to a maze. For patients dealing with mild or early symptoms, the effort can outweigh the perceived urgency. But missed windows for diagnosis can lead to major costs for patients, their families, and the wider healthcare system.
“Society pays for the very ignorance in the healthcare system’s design,” Salahandish said.
York University spinout WearDOXX is trying to reduce some of that friction through a non-invasive detection and monitoring platform built around a simple wearable patch.
The patch, which is as smooth as a Band-Aid, collects sweat from the skin that contains biomarkers of diseases such as autoimmune disorders, Alzheimer’s, epilepsy, and breast cancer. Users can scan the patch through a smartphone-based image analyzer, which interprets the results and routes them to a physician for review.
Rather than selling directly to consumers, the Toronto-based healthtech startup intends to work through physicians and telehealth providers, positioning the platform as a physician-supervised diagnostic and monitoring tool.
“We are moving from inflammation to cancer and autoimmune diseases, to ensure fewer people in society miss the window of opportunity for taking action on their health,” Salahandish added.
WearDOXX grew out of the years Salahandish spent watching sophisticated research fail to make it beyond academia. Before founding the startup, she completed a doctorate in electrochemistry, a postdoctoral fellowship, and co-founded two other companies.
Salahandish said those experiences exposed a recurring problem in research commercialization, where technically strong products are built without enough consideration for how people would actually use them.
“WearDOXX was born of the simple, ugly, hard-learned perspective formed in years of sophisticated technology work: nobody cares how complex the science is,” she continued. “They care if it solves a problem for them.”
This was a mindset shift that shaped the company’s development process. Salahandish said the team approached the product “backwards,” starting from the perspective of the end user and the realities of clinical workflows, rather than the underlying science alone.
This year, WearDOXX is moving from prototype-stage development toward clinical validation and deployment. The company has secured more than $5 million in committed capital as it prepares for regulatory approval and market entry in Canada and the United States.
A major part of the work involves proving the platform can operate inside real healthcare systems, not just inside the lab. Dr. Sina Mirjalili, Director of Business Development at WearDOXX and Post-Doctoral Fellow at York University, said the company is currently focused on evidence-building, regulatory positioning, and building trust in the sensor.
“For diagnostics, the dangerous mistake is to overclaim too early,” Mirjalili said. “A technology can be exciting, but regulators do not approve of excitement. They look at intended use, analytical performance, clinical evidence, user workflow, data handling, and risk.”
WearDOXX has also started laying the groundwork for commercialization outside the lab through intellectual property planning. The company filed an international patent application under the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT), which could create a path to pursue patent protection across more than 150 countries.
“WearDOXX was born of the simple, ugly, hard-learned perspective formed in years of sophisticated technology work: nobody cares how complex the science is. They care if it solves a problem for them.”
YSpace, York University’s entrepreneurship and innovation hub, has played an important role in helping WearDOXX navigate those systems. David Kwok, Director of Entrepreneurship and Innovation at YSpace, said one of the most common mistakes researchers make is assuming technical validation alone is enough to build a successful company.
“In healthtech especially, moving from a successful prototype to a market-ready product is rarely just a technology challenge—it’s a systems challenge,” Kwok said. “Teams often underestimate the complexity of regulatory approvals, reimbursement models, manufacturing scalability, procurement cycles, and customer acquisition.”
Kwok said YSpace has worked with WearDOXX on commercialization planning, fundraising readiness, customer discovery, partnerships, and IP strategy, with support from York University’s IP Innovation Clinic. Through the university’s inventor-owned IP policy, researchers also retain all ownership of their inventions, which Kwok said gives founders more agency as they build.
“It would be fair to say that [our work] wouldn’t have been possible without them,” Salahandish said about YSpace and York University.
Kwok said companies like WearDOXX represent a broader challenge and opportunity for Canada’s innovation ecosystem. For more university-born technologies to make the leap beyond the lab, he said, researchers need company-building support early enough to shape the business around real markets and regulatory demands.
“Canada has extraordinary research talent, but one of our biggest opportunities is improving how we scale and commercialize homegrown innovation from our labs and research,” Kwok said. “Companies like WearDOXX show what becomes possible when strong science is paired with commercialization infrastructure, entrepreneurial support, and global ambition from the earliest stages.”
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Feature image courtesy YSpace.