An online brain assessment platform has secured funding to enable its work in telehealth to continue to support people as the world emerges from the COVID-19 pandemic.
Cambridge Brain Sciences (CBS) is planning to expand its operation through a funding round from Canadian Shield Capital, a Toronto-based private equity investment firm, closely aligned to Hatch, a global engineering consultancy.
The investment will allow Candian-based CBS to further its work in digital health, especially around mental health, and respond to the need for accurate and reliable quantified measures of brain function and brain health – hailed as being essential to so many people who have suffered psychologically from the effects of COVID-19.
The funds will allow CBS to grow its sales and customer support teams rapidly, which will enable it to roll out its flagship product, CBS Health, further.
It will also enable it to expand on CBS Health features to help continue to refine and develop its cognitive care platform for healthcare professionals treating the growing mental health, brain injury and ageing patient populations.
The COVID-19 global pandemic has seen many healthcare practitioners to adopt platforms such as CBS Health to manage patients remotely.
As a result of lockdowns and ‘stay at home’ guidance, there has been exponential growth in patients seeking treatment for mental health conditions brought on, or exacerbated by, the pandemic, as well as individuals recovering from COVID-19 suffering with longer term neurological symptoms.
CBS Health has also grown as a result, and offers a web-based platform or integration which allows healthcare professionals to administer the CBS tasks standalone or alongside other established and validated complementary assessments (such as the PHQ-9, a standard scale for assessing the severity of depressive symptoms).
Assessments can be combined into a single session and administered in person or remotely via email—an option from which clinicians have benefitted greatly throughout the COVID-19 global pandemic.
The investment also contemplates further collaboration between CBS and Hatch, building upon an earlier successful pilot for a dedicated CBS platform to address corporate workplace mental health and safety at large scale industrial operations, construction sites and infrastructure projects.
“CBS is excited to be closing this round of financing which builds upon a long-term relationship with Canadian Shield and an earlier successful pilot with Hatch,” says Marc Lipton, president and CEO of Cambridge Brain Sciences.
“The funding will allow us to further accelerate the growth of our core CBS Health product especially amongst mental health practitioners, as well as to strategically explore, with Hatch, large corporate applications for workplace mental health and safety.”
“CBS brings many years of academic discipline and rigorous digital measurement of cognitive health, with applications in mental health, brain injury recovery, healthy ageing, and soon workplace safety,” says Andrew W. Dunn, managing partner at Canadian Shield Capital.
“The growing awareness of, and attention to, mental health conditions and CBS’ engaging and efficient approach gives it enormous runway.”
James Marzocca, global managing director for project delivery at Hatch, adds: “We see great potential to apply CBS testing as a non-invasive diagnostic to assess fitness for duty for individuals reporting to worksites where mental alertness is essential for their own safety and the safety of others.”
