Cambridge Cognition Holdings plc (LON: COG), which develops and markets digital solutions to assess brain health, has today announced the second commercial partnership with a leading pharmaceutical company, for its NeuroVocalixTM platform.
NeuroVocalix™ is a unique voice biomarker technology and the product was launched last year and recently presented ground-breaking demonstrable evidence of the potential at a major global Alzheimer’s conference.
Verbal neuropsychological tests are widely used in cognitive research and clinical trials. However, to date, employing these tasks in large scale screening and home based monitoring programmes has been limited by a dependence on skilled raters. In efforts to address this need, the NeuroVocalixTM platform was developed to automatically administer voice based cognitive assessments.
By using the platform to deliver remote assessments, clinical trials can be conducted at scale without the logistical and cost burden of needing skilled raters to supervise every visit. Furthermore, the platform supports exploration into potential voice based biomarkers, such as objectively quantifying the mental effort participants are having to use to complete the task.
There is growing interest from major pharmaceutical companies in voice based clinical trials, which represents an exciting growth market for the future. Indeed, following the success of the first NeuroVocalixTM signing in September 2018, the Company has now partnered with a top 10 global pharmaceutical company that has licenced the technology for its next virtual trial. Cambridge Cognition will deploy the software directly onto participants’ own smartphones; supporting them to engage in the testing protocol from the comfort of their own homes.
In March last year Cambridge Cognition secured a grant from Innovate UK, which provided funds to help support the development of the platform. The key findings from this project, including evidence that cognitive load can be derived by applying machine learning to voice data collected on participants’ own devices and in their own homes, has been presented at the Alzheimer’s Association International Conference in Los Angeles, USA, earlier this week. NeuroVocalix™ is likely to be particularly useful for patients with Alzheimer’s disease as many of the most sensitive measures of neurodegeneration are verbal tests.
Matthew Stork, Chief Executive Officer at Cambridge Cognition Holdings said:
“We are delighted to have received an order from a leading pharmaceutical company to trial the NeuroVocalix™ platform. We are also very pleased with the results from the work funded by Innovate UK, which enabled us to complete vital validation work. Providing automated verbal testing and at the same time identifying voice biomarkers during clinical trials could help accelerate and improve the quality of clinical trials, benefiting patients across the world and providing a major opportunity for Cambridge Cognition.”
