NeuraLight today launched out of stealth with a mission to transform the lives of billions of people suffering from neurological disorders by digitizing neurological evaluation and care. Using video generated by a standard smartphone or web camera, NeuraLight applies proprietary Computer Vision and Deep Learning algorithms to capture objective and sensitive digital markers to help accelerate drug development and increase the success rates of new drugs. These digital endpoints can be used during all phases of the clinical trial for a wide host of neurological disorders ultimately helping accelerate clinical trials and increase the probability of success of future therapies for Parkinsons, Alzheimers, multiple sclerosis, and other neurodegenerative diseases.
After founding Chorus.ai, which sold to ZoomInfo for $575M, CEO and co-founder Micha Breakstone is applying AI to modernize the industrys ability to advance neurological care and, together with co-Founder and repeat entrepreneur Edmund Ben-Ami, has recruited top talent to drive the companys mission forward. The team includes Chief Innovation Officer Dr. Rivka Kretiman, previously Head of Global Innovative Research and Development of Teva Pharmaceuticals, who has 26+ years in the pharmaceutical industry, and Professor Ruth Djaldetti, Head of The Movement Disorder Center at the Rabin Medical Center, who will lead the Scientific Advisory Board as well as multiple alumni from Google, Chorus.ai, and Viz.ai.
Over one billion people worldwide suffer from neurological disorders, most of which have no cure. Currently, neurological evaluation is highly subjective, non-sensitive, and depends on a manual examination of symptoms. As such, pharmaceutical companies havent had effective tools to develop precise and effective therapies.
Having worked in the pharmaceutical industry for the last two decades, I can confidently say that digital endpoints are the future of neurology, remarked Rivka Kretiman, Ph.D., Chief Innovation Officer at NeuraLight. This technology has been the missing piece pharma has needed to make drug development for neurological diseases effective and ultimately more successful, and will create a new standard of measurement for these companies drug development pipelines.
Using a Smartphone to Unlock New Therapies
The team has built a platform that automatically extracts micro-oculometrics, or microscopic eye movement measurements, that serve as objective, sensitive, and reliable digital endpoints for neurological disorders. NeuraLights advanced signal processing algorithms achieve sub-pixel resolution and remove both light and movement noise from the video frames, which are captured using a standard smartphone or webcam. Since the platform is device-agnostic, pharmaceutical companies can easily integrate and scale NeuraLight into clinical trials and in remote settings while also improving the patient experience. In gathering de-identified data from hundreds of thousands of patients, NeuraLight is building the largest, proprietary, de-identified oculometric database and applying AI to surface insights from the data.
Neurological diseases are slow killers and are notoriously difficult to measure and treat, so often patients and their loved ones are at the mercy of the disease, and its painful to watch, remarks NeuraLights CEO and Co-Founder Dr. Micha Breakstone. We are on a mission to help improve the quality of life for patients suffering from neurological disorders, and were doing that by giving pharmaceutical companies tools to find neurological patterns in patients during clinical trials and build more targeted and effective therapies.
In addition to Kretimans and Djaldettis leadership, Nobel Prize winner Alvin Roth; ex-Flatiron Healths CTO Gil Shklarski, Ph.D.; and Founder & CEO of Pomelo Care, Marta Bralic Kerns, will advise the companys scientific vision as members of NeuraLights Scientific Advisory Board. Investors including MSAD, Kli, Tuesday, Operator Partners, and VSC Ventures, the communications consulting agency which specializes in early-stage biotech companies, have fueled $5.5M in funding into NeuraLights seed round. Angel investors including Trax Retails founding CEO Tamara Minick-Scokalo; Instacart CEO Fidji Simo, who recently launched Health Research Institute Metrodora; Clover Health CEO Vivek Garipalli; and Noam Soloman, CEO of Immunai which Micha invested in during the companys seed-stage three years ago also join the round with confidence that NeuraLights team and technology will pave the path for precision medicine in neurology.
With this seed funding, the company is looking to partner with pharma companies to help them increase the success rate in developing new drugs, reduce billions of dollars in development costs, and significantly shorten time to market. By implementing NeuraLight, pharma companies can optimize patient selection, reduce the size of the trial, shorten the length of the clinical trial, and increase its probability of success.
To learn more about NeuraLight and how to partner with the company for clinical trials, visit: https://neuralight.ai/
About NeuraLight
NeuraLight is a VC-backed venture on a mission to transform the lives of billions of people impacted by neurological disorders by digitizing neurology. Our AI-driven platform integrates multiple objective and standardized digital markers to accelerate and improve drug development, monitoring, and care for patients with neurological disorders. The technology driving the platform includes proprietary Computer Vision & Deep Learning algorithms which automatically extract a host of digital oculometric markers from facial videos captured with a standard smartphone or webcam. These markers serve as an accurate and reliable proxy for currently used endpoints, and taken together form an accurate snapshot of the neurological status. Founded by two repeat entrepreneurs (including co-founder of Chorus.ai), and supported by renowned neurologists and a Nobel Laureate, as well as a stellar Scientific Advisory Board, NeuraLight has raised a seed of $5.5M from world-class investors.
