UPDATED - May, 2024

OBITUARY: Ira Shoulson - APRIL 4, 1946 – MAY 12, 2024

In Memory of Ira Shoulson MD, Modality.AI: https://modality.ai/news#h.9yj4ulurnctv 

In Memoriam: MJFF Mourns Loss of Parkinson’s Research Leader Ira Shoulson

Modality.AI, a digital health company pioneering self-driven, remote assessment of neurological disorders using patented AI to analyze speech and facial gestures, has appointed Ira Shoulson, MD its Chief Medical Officer.

Dr. Shoulson is a leader in clinical research focused on Parkinson’s disease, with over 350 scientific publications. A founder of the Parkinson Study Group in 1987 and the Huntington Study Group in 1993, he also serves as a professor at the University of Rochester, adjunct professor at Georgetown University, and is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences.

Prior to joining Modality, Shoulson founded Grey Matter Technologies (GMT) in 2017 to develop a better way for patients to share what bothers them and how it affects their lives. The result is the clinically validated Patient Report of Problems™ ‒ the PROP™ ‒ which analyzes verbatim descriptions of the problems patients face, including their functioning, priorities, and symptoms. GMT and its PROP technology was acquired by Modality.AI in June 2022.

The PROP is based on a proprietary combination of state-of-the-art NLP, disease-specific ontologies, and expert curation for application to the care and research of patients affected by Parkinson’s disease and other neurological disorders. Shoulson noted, “Integrating GMT’s methods for classifying and enumerating what patients say in their own words with Modality’s multimodal and conversational technology creates a clinically validated and powerful platform for clinical and pharmaceutical research and improving patient care. I look forward to bringing my experience and connections to help make assessments of neurological conditions not only more accurate and useful for clinicians but also easier for patients to participate in and benefit from.”

GMT has partnered with the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research by administering PROP open-ended questionnaires to more than 45,000 people with Parkinson’s disease and control volunteers. Among GMT’s customers are several biopharma companies well known for their neurological programs.

Modality’s founder and CEO David Suendermann-Oeft said, “Integrating GMT’s methods will add what patients say ‒ not just how they say it  ‒ to our diagnostic capabilities and in this way inform and improve clinical care for people with neurological disorders.” 

About Modality

Modality.AI, Inc. was founded in 2018 by CEO David Suendermann-Oeft, PhD, and CTO David Pautler, PhD, experts in AI and signal processing. Modality has pioneered technology for assessing neurological and psychiatric conditions remotely or in clinical settings through AI-powered audio and visual measurements of patient conversations with their virtual agent Tina. 

From Parkinson’s disease to schizophrenia and depression, Modality's multimodal platform, listed with the FDA as a Class II medical device, is being used by leading clinical institutions globally to diagnose, monitor, and expedite the care and treatment of patients. 

Most recently, MedCity awarded Modality, backed by international venture capital funds and the NIH, first prize in their pharma tech pitch contest and likened Modality’s virtual assistant Tina to “Alexa of Clinical Trials.”

Reference Links

Ira Shoulson: 

https://www.michaeljfox.org/researcher/ira-shoulson-md  

https://www.researchgate.net/scientific-contributions/Ira-Shoulson-38827904

https://www.greymattertech.org

https://parkinson-study-group.org/

https://huntingtonstudygroup.org/hd-insights/meet-the-founder

David Suendermann-Oeft:

https://modality.ai

https://www.linkedin.com/in/oeft

http://oeft.com

Contacts

For further information, please contact:

David Fox

Chief Business Officer

Modality.ai

David.Fox@modality.ai