Cumulus Neuroscience raises $8.3M to develop EEG-based wireless ‘Fitbit for the brain’

Belfast-based Cumu­lus rais­es €6.9m for its ‘Fit­bit for the brain’ (The Irish Times):

… For­mer­ly known as Brain­Wave­Bank, the com­pa­ny has devel­oped a wire­less elec­troen­cephalo­gram (EEG) head­set and pro­pri­etary soft­ware plat­form that use advanced ana­lyt­ics and machine learn­ing to mea­sure cog­ni­tive fitness.

“This fund­ing will allow us to build on the ground-break­ing advances we have made in remote, fre­quent mon­i­tor­ing of brain activ­i­ty and cog­ni­tive func­tion in the home, in part­ner­ship with lead­ing devel­op­ers of dig­i­tal bio­mark­ers,” said Mr Cun­ning­ham, the company’s chief executive.

“We believe our inte­grat­ed next gen­er­a­tion plat­form can improve the exe­cu­tion of clin­i­cal tri­als by yield­ing sig­nif­i­cant time and cost sav­ings, adding mean­ing­ful val­ue to the next gen­er­a­tion of (CNS) ther­a­pies,” he added.

The invest­ment was led by the Demen­tia Dis­cov­ery Fund, a £250 mil­lion spe­cial­ist ven­ture cap­i­tal fund invest­ing in, and cre­at­ing, biotech com­pa­nies pur­su­ing trans­for­ma­tion­al ther­a­peu­tic approach­es for demen­tias includ­ing Alzheimer’s dis­ease. LifeArc, a self-fund­ed med­ical research char­i­ty also par­tic­i­pat­ed as did the UK Future Fund.

The Announcement:

Cumu­lus Neu­ro­science Announces £6 mil­lion Fund­ing Round Led by the Demen­tia Dis­cov­ery Fund and joined by LifeArc and UK Future Fund (press release):

Cumu­lus Neu­ro­science … announces a £6m financ­ing round led by the Demen­tia Dis­cov­ery Fund (DDF) joined by LifeArc, a med­ical research char­i­ty, and the UK Future Fund … Cumu­lus Neu­ro­science’s inte­grat­ed solu­tion is a state-of-the-art plat­form capa­ble of:

• cap­tur­ing fre­quent, lon­gi­tu­di­nal mea­sure­ments of brain activ­i­ty syn­chro­nous­ly with a com­pre­hen­sive range of func­tion­al and symp­to­matic domains out­side of the clin­ic, and
• pro­vid­ing unpar­al­leled insights, pow­ered by AI tech­niques, to sup­port clin­i­cal tri­al deci­sion mak­ing and execution

Ruth McK­er­nan DDF ven­ture part­ner and co-founder said: “Clin­i­cal tri­als in demen­tia are dif­fi­cult and the results have been large­ly dis­ap­point­ing, part­ly due to the lim­i­ta­tions of clin­i­cal tri­al method­ol­o­gy. My col­leagues in the DDF and a group of Phar­ma com­pa­nies and I have spent over a year work­ing togeth­er on how to mea­sure dis­ease pro­gres­sion and the effects of drugs bet­ter. The result is Cumu­lus Neu­ro­science, and we look for­ward to see­ing how this enabling plat­form tech­nol­o­gy can be used in demen­tia clin­i­cal stud­ies in the com­ing years, includ­ing those being run by DDF port­fo­lio com­pa­nies. If the plat­form is suc­cess­ful, then patients will ben­e­fit from bet­ter drugs sooner.”

News in Context:

• Machine-learn­ing study finds EEG brain sig­na­tures that pre­dict response to anti­de­pres­sant treatments
• The new fron­tier in neu­rocog­ni­tive mon­i­tor­ing and demen­tia screen­ing: the Apple Watch
• Alphabet’s X shares Amber EEG sys­tem to expand the quest for men­tal health biomarkers
• Next: Ana­lyz­ing typ­ing speed, speech and sleep pat­terns to iden­ti­fy cog­ni­tive decline, demen­tia, Parkinson’s, and more