Brooklyn Health Pioneers AI-Driven Mental Health Assessment in Clinical Trials

Brooklyn Health, a neuroscience technology startup, is revolutionizing mental health measurement and scoring in central nervous system (CNS) drug development through its innovative use of artificial intelligence. The company's platform, Willis, aims to modernize and standardize the assessment of mental health outcomes in clinical trials, addressing long-standing challenges in the field.

AI-Powered Clinical Outcome Assessment

Brooklyn Health's electronic clinical outcome assessment (eCOA) solution, Willis, leverages AI to automate the review of clinical interview quality and score accuracy. This technology provides real-time feedback to clinicians on interview administration and offers pharmaceutical sponsors unprecedented visibility into data quality at scale.

The platform's key features include:

• Intuitive user experience
• Native clinician training
• Real-time flagging of concerning events
• Robust data analytics
• Improved communication between clinical sites and pharmaceutical sponsors
• Secure and scalable cloud architecture

Dr. Anzar Abbas, neuroscientist and founder of Brooklyn Health, explains, "Our tech is really a step function forward from the status quo today, which relies on a lot of manual review and manual work to using tech to more objectively quantify patient health and functioning."

Digital Phenotyping and OpenWillis

Central to Brooklyn Health's approach is the use of digital phenotyping, a novel field focused on objectively measuring behavioral indicators of illness. The company has developed OpenWillis, an open-source Python library for digital phenotyping, which serves as the foundation of its measurement technology.

OpenWillis provides researchers with tools for quantifying:

• Facial emotions
• Voice and speech characteristics
• Motor functioning
• Other behavioral indicators of mental health

By making its core methods available to the scientific community, Brooklyn Health aims to foster a collaborative approach to validating novel methods in digital phenotyping while building proprietary tools for commercial scaling.

Industry Partnerships and Funding

Brooklyn Health has secured partnerships with major pharmaceutical companies, including Bristol Myers Squibb and Boehringer Ingelheim. These collaborations have helped validate the underlying science and build scientific and clinical credibility in the field.

The company recently raised $6.5 million in seed funding led by HealthX Ventures, with participation from Metrodora Ventures, Story Ventures, RiverPark Ventures, Laconia Capital, Everywhere Ventures, Hypothesis Studio, Blue Falcon Capital, and other investors. This funding will be used to expand the team, enhance Willis' capabilities, and accelerate commercial deployments with pharmaceutical companies.

Mark Bakken, founder and managing partner at HealthX Ventures, stated, "Brooklyn Health is directly addressing what has ailed CNS drug development for decades: endpoint quality and placebo response."

In a recent analysis conducted for one of its pharmaceutical customers, Brooklyn Health demonstrated that using Willis to score clinical interviews in a psychiatry study improved separation of drug from placebo by 34% as measured by effect size, highlighting the potential impact of the technology on trial outcomes.