Zak Marks
Zak Marks, Co-Founder and CEO of Kitt Medical, has transformed his personal battle with severe nut allergies and health anxiety into a mission to improve allergy management. Drawin...
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Who are you?
I'm Zach. I'm 27 years old from London. I've lived with allergies for most of my life, and also anxiety. I love the outdoors. I love creativity. I love my family, and I love being passionate about making change, and that's why I founded KIPP Medical.
What is an allergy?
So an allergy is all to do with your body's immune system. It's when something harmless is treated as something harmful. And that can be a protein found in a peanut, for example, as it is with me, as well as lots of other tree nuts and legumes like peas, chickpeas, and lentils. Or it could be pollen, a bee sting, hay fever. Pretty much anything can cause an allergic reaction, and for many people, an allergy just looks like sneezing, itching, and rashes. But for peoples like myself that have anaphylaxis, it means your body can go into full shutdown and is a life-threatening scenario.
How many lives have you impacted so far with Kitt Medical?
So we launched our kits at the start of 2023. That's when we first started selling them to schools, and six months ago now. So midway through 2024, we launched our anaphylaxis kits for qualifying businesses with occupational health. Now, two years on since launching, we have 550 organisations that have signed up with us and a total of 750 kits across the uk. So it's estimated to be impacting really millions of people, anyone in those vicinities directly. We know that 15,000 staff members have completed our online training course, which has taken them from an average level five of allergy awareness and preparedness to treat anaphylaxis to a level 10, just within half an hour. And then, I guess most importantly, our kits have been used on nine separate occasions to treat life-threatening allergic reactions, and save people's lives.