Brooklyn Health, a neuroscience technology company focused on objective measurement of mental health, has secured $6.5 million in seed funding to advance its artificial intelligence-powered platform for improving clinical trial outcomes in central nervous system (CNS) disorders. The round was 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.
The funding announcement coincides with the debut of Willis, the company's comprehensive electronic clinical outcome assessment (eCOA) solution that automates legacy clinical trial services through AI technology.
Addressing Critical Measurement Challenges in CNS Trials
CNS clinical trials traditionally rely on clinical interviews as the primary outcome measure for treatment efficacy, allowing clinicians to score symptoms through observation and measure treatment response. However, this approach faces significant limitations that contribute to the high failure rate of CNS clinical trials.
"Clinical interviews are difficult to standardize, and scoring is often subjective and susceptible to biases," according to the company's analysis. "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."
Dr. Anzar Abbas, neuroscientist, CEO and founder of Brooklyn Health, emphasized the scope of the problem: "Measurement is a core issue in neurology and psychiatry. 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 Platform Delivers Real-Time Quality Control
The Willis platform directly addresses these measurement challenges through AI-powered review of clinical interview quality and score accuracy. The system provides clinicians with real-time feedback on interview administration while giving pharmaceutical sponsors unprecedented visibility into data quality at scale.
Prior to Willis, interview review was an entirely manual process, making it impractical and prohibitively expensive for most study sponsors. The platform represents a significant modernization of the eCOA infrastructure, featuring 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.
Demonstrated Clinical Impact
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. This finding highlights the platform's potential impact on trial outcomes and success rates.
The company has already secured partnerships with major pharmaceutical companies, including Bristol Myers Squibb and Boehringer Ingelberg. Additionally, Brooklyn Health's technology has been adopted by researchers at Harvard University, Yale University, UCLA, Columbia University, and dozens of other academic institutions.
Open-Source Foundation Drives Innovation
Central to Brooklyn Health's approach is OpenWillis, an open-source Python library for digital phenotyping that serves as the foundation of its measurement technology. Unlike competitors that rely on proprietary algorithms, Brooklyn Health has made its core methods available to the scientific community.
OpenWillis provides researchers with a toolkit for quantifying facial emotions, voice and speech characteristics, motor functioning, and other behavioral indicators of mental health. This approach bridges the gap between academic research and clinical applications, fostering a community-driven approach to the validation of novel methods in digital phenotyping.
Investment and Future Plans
Mark Bakken, Founder and Managing Partner at HealthX Ventures, highlighted the significance of Brooklyn Health's approach: "Brooklyn Health is directly addressing what has ailed CNS drug development for decades: endpoint quality and placebo response. They're modernizing the technology stack for drug development, moving it from services to software, and empowering sponsors with the tools they need to ensure successful studies."
The company plans to use the new funding to expand its team, enhance Willis' capabilities, and accelerate commercial deployments with pharmaceutical companies. Brooklyn Health is already demonstrating considerable value, with early work showing the potential to improve trial outcomes while reducing costs.
