Brooklyn Health, a neuroscience technology company, secured $6.5 million in seed funding.
The round was led by HealthX, with participation from Metrodora Ventures, Story Ventures, RiverPark Ventures, Laconia Capital, Everywhere Ventures, Hypothesis Studio and Blue Falcon Capital.
WHAT IT DOES
Brooklyn Health measures mental health outcomes in clinical trial participants.
According to Brooklyn Health, central nervous system clinical trials depend heavily on clinical interviews as their primary outcome measure for treatment. The company says the interviews enable the scoring of symptoms via observation and are essential to measure variations in response to treatment.
In a statement, the company said that “clinical interviews are difficult to standardize and scoring is subjective and susceptible to biases,” and could result in undependable outcome measures and is also linked to the placebo response, which may contribute to the high failure rate of CNS clinical trials.
Brooklyn Health said those obstacles might be alleviated with its new electronic clinical outcome assessment platform, Willis.
The Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR) describes digital phenotyping as “near real-time data collection from personal digital devices, particularly smartphones, to better quantify the human phenotype.”
According to the company, Willis consists of three parts:
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OpenWillis is a shared library of methods in digital phenotyping.
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WillisPipeline is intended for organizations collecting behavioral data and can commit computational resources to processing it for clinically meaningful measures.
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WillisAPI permits digital health platforms to process the data they collect for measures that can help them better serve their users and customers.
The company asserts that with WillisAPI, instead of investing in developing and validating novel measures, platforms can lean on existing measures with collective acceptance in the scientific community.
Brooklyn Health will use the funds to increase its team, boost Willis’ proficiencies and hasten commercial deployments with pharmaceutical companies.
“Measuring treatment efficacy in neuroscience clinical trials is hard because of how subjective clinical assessments can be,” Anzar Abbas, neuroscientist, founder and CEO of Brooklyn Health, told MobiHealthNews.
“Willis allows pharmaceutical sponsors to improve the accuracy and reliability of measures in their trials in a way they’ve never been able to before. It’s thrilling, because if we reduce barriers to drug development, we get closer to a future where patients get more targeted, precise and effective care.”
MARKET SNAPSHOT
Other companies in the CNS clinical trials space include Grey Matter Neurosciences, which secured $14 million in seed financing in January.
The funds were used to develop an ultrasound headset for individuals with Alzheimer’s disease and test that device in clinical trials.
The financing was led by the Wittington Innovation Fund, with participation from the Toronto Innovation Acceleration Partners, the Ontario Brain Institute and Ontario’s Life Sciences Innovation Fund.
The company also licensed advanced focused ultrasound technology developed at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre Research Institute.
Lexeo Therapeutics utilizes gene therapy to address central nervous system diseases affecting both rare and prevalent patient populations. The company’s pipeline includes CNS-focused gene therapies, featuring a portfolio of approaches to treat the genetic underpinnings of Alzheimer’s disease.
Neumora is focused on advancing medicines for therapeutically relevant targets implicated in CNS diseases, targeting novel mechanisms of action with best-in-class pharmacology.
IQVIA provides advanced analytics, technology and clinical research services for various disciplines in healthcare, including neurology, neurodegenerative diseases, psychiatry, sleep, CNS rare diseases and pain.
TFS HealthScience is a mid-size contract research organization (CRO) that partners with biotech and pharmaceutical companies throughout their clinical development.
TFS Neuroscience CRO has expertise across a range of neuroscience indications in neurology and the CNS, including Alzheimer’s disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and multiple sclerosis (MS), as well as in non-neurology areas such as psychiatry and pain, including addiction, schizophrenia and neuropathy.
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