BIOS HEALTH EXPANDS ITS COLLABORATIONS IN CANADA WITH CA$800k INITIATIVE ON GROUNDBREAKING NEURAL BIOMARKER RESEARCH
Cambridge, UK & Montreal, CA – 26 May 2020 – BIOS Health is proud to announce a groundbreaking CA$800,000 research partnership with Mila, McGill University and the Université de Montréal, to develop an AI-controlled closed-loop neuromodulation system for chronic cardiac conditions. This partnership expands BIOS’ involvement with Mila, a Montreal-based research institute in artificial intelligence. The BIOS team will be working closely with Dr. Blake Richards, Assistant Professor, School of Computer Science, McGill University and Dr. Guillaume Lajoie, Assistant Professor, Applied Mathematics, Université de Montréal in conducting this research.
Emil Hewage, CEO & Co-founder of BIOS said: “BIOS opened its first R&D office outside of Europe in Montreal 18 months ago to take advantage of the city’s talent and expertise in AI and deep learning, choosing to collaborate with the Mila AI hub. The announcement of this new research partnership speaks to the success of this collaboration so far, and will allow us to expand our Canadian operations going forward.
“The research we will be able to conduct means we can develop AI-enabled neural interface treatments that will prove life-changing for patients with chronic diseases. At a time when Covid-19 is highlighting the fragility of health for those with chronic diseases, we are proud to be launching new initiatives that have the potential to create vastly more powerful treatments and preventions, and therefore reduce the number of people at high risk in the long-term.”
BIOS’s mission is to transform healthcare by developing a full-stack neural interface platform that is optimised to decode and encode the signals from the brain to the body, to treat chronic health conditions. Its vision is that patients will have their chronic conditions managed via the nervous system directly by AI, giving personalised and accurate treatments through computer generated neural signals – replacing drugs and changing the lives of millions of people. This partnership will enable BIOS to make significant strides in realising its mission by using Machine Learning to link cardiac activity to neural data and identify the neural biomarkers of cardiac activity that are the building blocks of new treatments.
In the past decade, direct neural interfacing has established itself as a viable complement, and many times a superior alternative to, traditional clinical interventions,” said Dr. Guillaume Lajoie, Assistant Professor, Applied Mathematics, Université de Montréal. “The next decade is likely to bring paradigm-shifting uses of this novel class of treatments, and BIOS is strategically poised to address the challenges that guard this progress. I am extremely excited to team up with the talented people at BIOS and leverage cutting edge AI techniques to lay the foundation for neural interfacing standards.
GUILLAUME LAJOIE PhD
ASSISTANT PROFESSOR, APPLIED MATHEMATICS
UNIVERSITÉ DE MONTRÉAL
"Neural interface technology represents a potentially game-changing approach to health care innovation,” said Dr. Blake Richards, Assistant Professor, School of Computer Science, McGill University. “However, the complexity of signals in the nervous system can make it difficult to engineer precision control systems. BIOS' approach of using machine learning algorithms for deciphering neural signals is the best hope we have for harnessing the full promise of neural interface tech, and we are very excited to be partnering with them to further this research."
“MEDTEQ actively supports collaborative projects focusing on new technologies, and very frequently, artificial intelligence is at the forefront. By taking advantage of the expertise Montreal has to offer and by collaborating with Canadian partners, BIOS can transform the healthcare sector. We are proud to support them bringing this technology to life, as it can ultimately create new ways to treat patients with chronic-diseases” said Diane Côté, CEO of MEDTEQ.
This next stage of research will be funded by partners including MEDTEQ (the pan-Canadian Consortium for Industrial Research and Innovation in Medical Technology), MITACS, Healthy Brains, Healthy Lives and BIOS.
About BIOS Health
BIOS is unlocking the potential of the nervous system in treating chronic disease by using AI-powered neural interfaces that can automatically read and write neural signals. The human nervous system carries vast quantities of data and scientists have long known that faulty signals in the nervous system play a key role in driving chronic diseases. By understanding and correcting these signals in real time, BIOS can treat chronic illnesses in an effective, automated, and personalised way. BIOS has leveraged recent breakthroughs in AI and Machine Learning to translate the “language” of the nervous system for the first time. BIOS’ neural code is built on the world’s largest proprietary neural data set and is already in use clinically to enhance data from wearables used in remote chronic disease care.
Co-founded by Cambridge University graduates Emil Hewage, a computational neuroscientist, and Oliver Armitage, a biomechanical engineer, BIOS is made up of a wide range of experts from neuroscience, machine learning, software engineering, applied biomaterials, biotechnology, and medicine. The combined experience of the BIOS team extends to over 300 peer-reviewed publications, 10+ First of kind medical devices and 6k+ clinical procedures.
Media contact
Hailey Eustace
Head of Communications
BIOS Health
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