What You Should Know:
– Brooklyn Health, a neuroscience technology company focused on objective measurement of mental health announced it has secured $6.5M in seed funding led by HealthX, with participation from Metrodora Ventures, Story Ventures, RiverPark Ventures, Laconia Capital, Everywhere Ventures, Hypothesis Studio, Blue Falcon Capital, and others.
– The funding coincides with the company’s debut of its new electronic clinical outcome assessment (eCOA) solution, Willis. Willis is a comprehensive measurement platform that automates legacy services through artificial intelligence (AI), aiming to ease access to critical tools necessary for successful drug development in Central Nervous System (CNS) clinical trials.
Tackling the Measurement Crisis in Neurology and Psychiatry
Clinical trials for CNS conditions traditionally rely on clinical interviews as the primary outcome measure for treatment efficacy. These interviews allow for the scoring of symptoms through observation and are vital for measuring changes in response to treatment. However, this method faces significant challenges: clinical interviews are difficult to standardize, and scoring is often subjective and susceptible to biases. This can lead to unreliable outcome measures and is associated with placebo response, both of which are major contributors to the high failure rate of CNS clinical trials, costing the industry billions of dollars annually.
“Measurement is a core issue in neurology and psychiatry,” said Dr. Anzar Abbas, neuroscientist, CEO and founder of Brooklyn Health. “Clinical interviews, the standard for symptom assessment, are fundamentally unreliable and imprecise. Our mission at Brooklyn Health is to solve this measurement problem through accurate, sensitive and objective measures of mental health, lowering the barrier for drug discovery and enabling precision care”.
Willis: AI-Powered Precision for Clinical Trial Endpoints
Brooklyn Health’s Willis platform directly addresses these challenges through AI-powered review of clinical interview quality and score accuracy. This gives clinicians real-time feedback on interview administration and provides pharmaceutical sponsors with unprecedented visibility into data quality at scale. Prior to Willis, such interview review was an entirely manual process, making it impractical and prohibitively expensive for most study sponsors.
Willis also represents a significant modernization of the eCOA platform itself. It features an intuitive user experience, native clinician training, real-time flagging of concerning events, powerful data analytics, and streamlined communication channels between clinical sites and pharmaceutical sponsors, all built on a secure and scalable cloud architecture.
Open-Source Foundation: The Role of OpenWillis
Central to Brooklyn Health’s innovative approach is OpenWillis, an open-source Python library for digital phenotyping, which serves as the foundation of its measurement technology. Unlike competitors that often rely on proprietary algorithms, Brooklyn Health has made its core methods available to the scientific community. OpenWillis provides researchers with a simple toolkit for quantifying facial emotions, voice and speech characteristics, motor functioning, and other behavioral indicators of mental health. This bridges the gap between academic research and clinical applications, fostering a community-driven approach to the validation of novel methods in digital phenotyping.
