TORONTO, January 7, 2020
Winterlight Labs has entered into an agreement with Pear Therapeutics to develop speech-based biomarkers to improve the efficacy of prescription digital therapeutics.
Pear licensed machine learning-based voice digital biomarkers from Winterlight Labs, an innovator of technology that analyzes and assesses cognitive health. Pear licensed the technology to develop and clinically validate digital biomarkers for a variety of diseases, including Alzheimer's disease, depression, insomnia, schizophrenia, opioid use disorder, and substance use disorder.
Speech-based biomarkers could help to titrate the dose and modify the type of treatment a patient needs. By embedding these biomarkers in PDTs, treatments can be rapidly and frequently tuned to improve outcomes.
Winterlight Labs is commercializing a proprietary language-based diagnostic system that analyzes 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 analyze 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.
Media Inquiries:
Winterlight Labs
Liam Kaufman, CEO
liam [at] winterlightlabs.com