First published: 1st March 2021
Cumulus Neuroscience announces it has signed a multi-year licensing agreement with Winterlight Labs to integrate Winterlight’s speech-based assessments and analytics into Cumulus’ next-generation integrated physiological and digital biomarker platform for CNS disorders.
Winterlight’s proprietary speech analytics extract hundreds of linguistic and acoustic cues from short snippets of natural speech recorded on mobile tablets. These metrics are then used to detect cognitive impairment associated with dementia and other CNS conditions and quantify the severity of the condition.
Cumulus will integrate these capabilities into its diverse platform, which also includes facial recognition, sleep monitoring and home EEG technology, among other digital and physiological CNS biomarker tools. These tools, integrated together on a single platform, have the potential to address many of the challenges inherent in CNS clinical trials and accelerate the development of new medicines directed towards CNS diseases.
Cumulus Neuroscience CSO Brian Murphy, Ph.D., commented: “Cumulus was founded to provide the optimal suite of tools to measure progression of CNS diseases in patients and bringing Winterlight’s speech analytics on board represents a significant step forward in this work. Winterlight’s technology has demonstrated impressive results in a variety of settings, and we are excited to leverage the combined potential of our tools to address significant unmet patient need in CNS disorders.”
Liam Kaufman, CEO of Winterlight Labs, added: “CNS disease progression and clinical outcomes are notoriously difficult for researchers to measure accurately, and this has often held back the development of effective new treatments for patients. By working with innovative companies like Cumulus, Winterlight hopes to reshape the way healthcare systems track, screen for and assess the effectiveness of treatments for various CNS conditions.”
Winterlight Labs is commercialising a proprietary language-based diagnostic system that analyses natural speech to detect and monitor dementia, Alzheimer’s, aphasia, and various other cognitive conditions. Winterlight's scalable platform uses short, recorded speech samples to analyse hundreds of linguistic cues, and can detect dementia and other conditions with a high level of accuracy. This is a major improvement over current pencil-and-paper tests which are time-consuming, costly, and difficult to administer. The platform has applications in drug trials, long-term and primary care, and speech-language pathology.
Since its founding, Winterlight Labs has seen strong interest from pharmaceutical companies and other potential partners who view the technology as a major improvement over current methods of detection or screening. The company has gained support from the pan-Canadian AGE-WELL Network of Centres of Excellence (NCE), the Ontario Brain Institute, Ontario Centres of Excellence, and the University of Toronto Banting and Best Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship. For more information, visit www.winterlightlabs.com