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11 January 2023

Cambridge Cognition and Winterlight Labs join forces to lead in voice and digital biomarkers for clinical trials

Cambridge Cognition, which develops and markets digital solutions to assess brain health, is pleased to announce its acquisition of Winterlight, a leader in monitoring cognitive impairment through free-speech analysis.

Both Cambridge Cognition and Winterlight share a common goal of developing digital health products to better understand, detect and treat conditions affecting brain health. The capabilities of the combined organisation will create a company with strengths across technology platforms for screen-based, structured voice-based and free-speech based cognitive assessments for clinical trials.

Winterlight was spun out of Toronto University in 2015 with proprietary free-speech and vocal biomarker technology. They have gone on to develop a Quality Assurance platform for the review of clinical interviews. To date, Cambridge Cognition’s approach to voice technology has been to scale the delivery of well-validated cognitive tests by replicating and automating short, structured verbal assessments that incorporate novel intellectual property. With complementary solutions, the combined company is well positioned to secure a market leading position in voice biomarker technology for clinical trials, with further potential for healthcare applications in the future and scope to develop sensitive multi-modal biomarkers for CNS disorders. 

Commenting, Matthew Stork, Chief Executive Officer of Cambridge Cognition, said:

“Having developed short speech-based cognitive assessments for several years, we have seen the considerable potential for longer free-speech assessments. There’s a major opportunity over the medium term for growth in this field and it’s important to be an early entrant to secure a strong position for the future. Winterlight has established itself as a leader in monitoring cognitive impairment through free-speech analysis. With this acquisition, we can now offer many of the verbal cognitive assessments used in clinical trials giving us the potential for major growth over the next few years.  We look forward to welcoming our 28 new colleagues from Winterlight so that together we can build on our combined expertise in voice technology to drive innovation in drug development.” 

Commenting, Liam Kaufman, Cofounder of Winterlight Labs, said:

“For nearly 8 years as a company and many years before within the University of Toronto, Winterlight has worked to develop speech-based digital biomarkers for healthcare and clinical trials. I am incredibly proud of what we have engineered, validated and delivered to our life science partners. This transaction opens an exciting new chapter for Winterlight. We bring to Cambridge Cognition proprietary free-speech analysis technology and a dedicated team that are experts in the field. We are looking forward to being a part of Cambridge Cognition and together we can build a leading position in vocal biomarker technology.”

 

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