Sanofi Ventures leads $17M investment in Click Therapeutics, finalist @ 2017 Brainnovations Pitch Contest

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Sanofi Backs Click Ther­a­peu­tics as Dig­i­tal Med­i­cines Gain Momen­tum (Xcon­o­my):

“Drug mak­ers are mak­ing more bets on the nascent field of dig­i­tal med­i­cine. The lat­est exam­ple: Click Ther­a­peu­tics announced Mon­day that it grabbed a $17 mil­lion invest­ment led by Sanofi Ven­tures, the Cam­bridge, MA-based ven­ture cap­i­tal arm of the French phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal giant.

New York-based Click Ther­a­peu­tics devel­ops mobile apps intend­ed to be pre­scribed by doc­tors to treat med­ical con­di­tions, either on their own or in tan­dem with drugs or oth­er stan­dard treat­ments. The six-year-old com­pa­ny is work­ing on soft­ware that deliv­ers cog­ni­tive and “neu­robe­hav­ioral” exer­cis­es, aimed at treat­ing depres­sion, insom­nia, acute coro­nary syn­drome, and chron­ic pain…Click Ther­a­peu­tics already has a prod­uct on the mar­ket. “Click­o­tine” is an app designed to help peo­ple quit smok­ing, although the prod­uct doesn’t make any treat­ment claims and didn’t require FDA clear­ance to be mar­ket­ed to the pub­lic, accord­ing to a state­ment e‑mailed by a com­pa­ny spokesperson.

Last year, Click pub­lished results of an ini­tial sin­gle-arm clin­i­cal tri­al of Click­o­tine in the JMIR mHealth and uHealth jour­nal. Dur­ing the eight-week study, the 416 par­tic­i­pants opened the app an aver­age of 100 times and con­tin­ued using it for an aver­age of 5.3 weeks. At the end of the study, 45.2 per­cent of the par­tic­i­pants report­ed they hadn’t smoked for at least sev­en days, and 26.2 per­cent of them said they hadn’t smoked for at least 30 days. The most com­mon side effects were fatigue and mood changes, accord­ing to the study.”

The Study:

Click­o­tine, A Per­son­al­ized Smart­phone App for Smok­ing Ces­sa­tion: Ini­tial Eval­u­a­tion (JMIR mHealth). From the abstract:

  • Back­ground: Tobac­co smok­ing is the lead­ing cause of pre­ventable death in the Unit­ed States, and the annu­al eco­nom­ic bur­den attrib­ut­able to smok­ing exceeds US $300 bil­lion. Obsta­cles to smok­ing ces­sa­tion include lim­it­ed access and adher­ence to effec­tive ces­sa­tion inter­ven­tions. Tech­nol­o­gy can help over­come these obsta­cles; many smart­phone apps have been devel­oped to aid smok­ing ces­sa­tion, but few that con­form to the US clin­i­cal prac­tice guide­line (USCPG) have been rig­or­ous­ly test­ed and report­ed in the lit­er­a­ture. Click­o­tine is a nov­el smart­phone app for smok­ing ces­sa­tion, designed to deliv­er the essen­tial fea­tures of the USCPG and engi­neered to engage smok­ers by per­son­al­iz­ing inter­ven­tion components.
  • Objec­tive: Our objec­tive was to assess the engage­ment, effi­ca­cy, and safe­ty of Click­o­tine in an ini­tial, sin­gle-arm study. Out­comes mea­sured were indi­ca­tors of engage­ment with the smart­phone app (num­ber of app opens, num­ber of inter­ac­tions with the Click­o­tine pro­gram, and weeks active with Click­o­tine), ces­sa­tion out­comes of 7- and 30-day self-report­ed absti­nence from smok­ing, and neg­a­tive health events.
  • Con­clu­sions: In this ini­tial sin­gle-arm tri­al, Click­o­tine users appeared to demon­strate encour­ag­ing indi­ca­tors of engage­ment in terms of the num­ber of app opens, num­ber of pro­gram inter­ac­tions, and con­tin­ued engage­ment over time. Click­o­tine users report­ed encour­ag­ing quit rates while report­ing few adverse events. Future research is war­rant­ed to assess Clickotine’s effi­ca­cy in a ran­dom­ized con­trolled trial.

The News in Context: