Osentia
The Science Powering Osentia
Crescent Bone Health has worked with a number of established bone clinics across the UK and Ireland to test and refine Osentia, creating a safe and accurate test that can identify your risk of fragility fractures.
Unique perspective on bone health
The current diagnosis of bone health focuses on bone mineral density (BMD), alongside clinical risk factors of the individual. Bone mineral provides resistance so a low BMD means having little resistance during impacts leading to easier fracture. However, twice as many fragility fractures occur in people with ’normal' BMD. Lifestyle and demographic factors influence fracture risk but don’t directly measure the body’s condition for bone health.
Bone also includes a flexible protein framework that imparts resilience to bone; the ability to recover from an impact. Osentia measures the integrity of structural proteins in the human body.
When well-ordered, the proteins absorb large amounts of energy from an impact. When disordered, bone can crack. Information around the protein phase is independent of existing factors used in assessing fracture risk.
The technology powering Osentia
Osentia is powered by Raman spectroscopy, a method capable to creating a fingerprint of protein identity and structure in-situ.
The method is non-invasive (requiring just a nail clipping), rapid, accurate and reliable. It is widely used in pharmaceutical industry and forensics due to its high reliability and information content.
It is used to assess protein structure with high precision in unprocessed samples, allowing direct measurement of a protein in-situ without extraction.
This technical approach allows us to clearly discriminate between multiple protein structures including well ordered ‘ideal’ forms and disordered unsystematically arrange proteins. The balance of these forms provides us a window into the resilience of bone and its ability to safely recover from minor falls and impacts.
The biology powering Osentia
Structural proteins in the human body are organised by enzymes that control how their fibres coil and join. Present throughout the body, from bone to nail bed, these enzymes typically ensure the proteins are formed into highly organised fibres as they are generated. This process starts to go wrong due to changing biochemistry in the body when influenced by a range of clinical factors. Everywhere the clinical factors and the enzymes occur together, the same disruption is observed. Thanks to this body-wide connection measuring the structure of the nail protein the Osentia test is able to determine if the structural proteins of the bone are being built correctly.