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Modality Announces UCSF Partnership
Modality announced its partnership with the University of California, San Francisco’s Weill Institute of Neurosciences at the Alchemist Accelerator’s demo day in Menlo Park on September 20. Under the terms of the partnership, UCSF researchers are using Modality to help streamline their research process and optimize data collection and analysis.
“We just started using Modality to collect our data, and we can already see it saving us a great deal of time while collecting accurate information,” said Dr. Carly Demopoulos, Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at the Weill Institute. “Our research has become vastly more efficient and I’ve already started planning future studies that are made feasible by Modality.”
- View a video from Demo Day. [https://vimeo.com/362379517]
Dr. Dempoulos and her team study autism spectrum disorder, particularly characterizing the pathology’s underlying symptoms in order to develop targeted therapies. Autism affects more than 60 million people globally.
Traditionally in research, patients and their caregivers need to go to the lab for interviews, from which speech behaviors are manually recorded, analyzed, and categorized. This has historically been a very cumbersome and labor-intensive process.
“The underlying process to develop drugs and therapies are extremely inefficient,” said David Suendermann-Oeft, CEO and co-founder of Modality. Presently, drug trials take on average six years to complete, according to data from Johns Hopkins University, with 80% failing to secure FDA approval and a spend of roughly $70 billion a year.
“Modality has created a solution,” Dr. Suendermann-Oeft said. “We have created a neurological test that is based on the principle that engages the patient with an avatar in a conversation using the same protocols that the neurologist is using. We are extracting facial movements and speech patterns and producing in real time accurate metrics that are predictive of the clinical outcome.”
As a result, Modality can help close the trials four months earlier, reduce the failure rate by 15%, and increase return on investment in a drug’s investment by 80%.
- September 20, 2019
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Modality Names Four to Board of Advisors
Modality named four leading professionals in the medical and healthcare industries to its board of advisors.
- Dr. Jordan Green, Matina Souretis Horner Professor in Rehabilitation Sciences and Director of Speech and Feeding Disorder Lab and Associate Provost of Research at the MGH Institute of Health Professions at Harvard University
- Dr. Harneet Bath, Vice President of Inpatient Services at VEP Healthcare
- Dr. Gloria Lau, CEO and cofounder of Alpha Medical
- Dr. Irfan Qureshi, Vice President at Biohaven Pharmaceuticals
“Modality is delighted to have such a distinguished group of professionals join our advisory board. Their collective expertise will synergistically help Modality’s automatic speech and facial analytics capabilities to expedite drug trials, reduce the failure rate of trials, and increase the profitability of drugs,” said Dr. David Suendermann-Oeft, CEO and cofounder of Modality. “Their commitment to Modality further confirms the value that we provide to the clinical research space and to the pharmaceutical industry.”
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