Developer Akili Labs has raised $30.5 million in new equity investments to support further development of the company's products.
Akili Interactive Labs is a medical-based company that was founded for clinically tested videogames, designed to assess and personalize treatment for patients with cognitive-based disorders, including clinical depression, ADHD and those on the autism spectrum. The company has focused on developing mobile-based software that will target cognitive interference processing (mental blocks) while also adapting difficulty automatically in real-time. This allows patients to interact with the product in their homes without the need for physicians or additional hardware.
The first game being used for trials is called Project EVO, which was based on new technology by Dr. Adam Gazzaley of Gazzaley labs, from the University of California. The game has been featured in online medical journals such as Nature, and other pilot studies showing Project EVO has improved attention and memory in children diagnosed with ADHD. Complete clinical studies on Project EVO will be completed in 2017, positioning it to potentially launch later that year.
The new investments will support Akili in further developments on Project EVO, and other games that can be designed for treating patients, as well as providing Akili the ability to create a commercial infrastructure for an official product launch in 2017. The raising of this capital will also allow Akili Labs to receive clearance from the U.S Food and Drug Administration.
The company's new partners included JAZZ Venture Partners, PureTech Health and Capena Healthcare. "We're excited that, with the support of our new and existing investors," stated Akili CEO Eddie Martucci. "We can continue to advance our adaptive software platform towards clinical validation and commercialization as a fundamentally new type of mainstream medicine."
Likewise, John Spinale, former SVP of Social Games at Disney, and Partner at JAZZ Venture Partners, stated “We’re seeing the emergence of an entirely new category of non-pharmacological therapies, and Akili is leading the charge. We love their ability to target some of the most under-served patient populations and disrupt massive markets at the same time."
So what do you think about this news? Will Akili be successful at clinically treating patients with cognitive diseases? Leave your comments below.
