BIOS partners in Californian city to ramp up clinical trials agenda
Neural engineering company BIOS Health is partnering with the city of Bakersfield, Kern County, and Kern Venture Group (KVG) to establish a state-of-the-art precision medicine centre in Bakersfield, California.
The centre will be built around BIOS’s real-time insights into the nervous system, which provides crucial data previously inaccessible for diseases and conditions linked to the nervous system.
A major challenge in the healthcare industry today is a lack of any clear data and usable insights around the nervous system’s response to novel medicines and medical devices. This leads to high failure rates in clinical trials, costing the industry billions a year, and prevents potentially life-saving treatments from reaching patients - both of which the centre aims to address.
The new US ecosystem of clinicians, pharmaceutical and medical device companies, and clinical trial partners aim to identify new medicines and improve clinical trial success
The new site will be BIOS’s second international hub after launching an AI and neuroscience research site in Montreal, Canada, in 2018, and will accelerate its broader commercialisation in the US market.
BIOS Health was founded in 2015 by Cambridge University graduates Emil Hewage, a computational neuroscientist, and Oliver Armitage, a biomechanical engineer, with a mission to improve people’s quality of life with neural engineering.
Based on Hills Road, the pioneering company is developing technology to read and interpret neural signals in real-time with AI, giving crucial insights previously inaccessible to clinicians, and pharmaceutical and medical device companies.
BIOS has developed adaptive dosing technology, using neural biomarkers and AI, to observe and adjust in real-time, the effects of drugs and stimulations on patients’ nervous systems. For example, during implantation of neural stimulation devices, clinicians and their patients can now access real-time measurements of the effectiveness of their treatment, optimising the dosing in under 10 minutes compared to what normally takes 12 months or more of trial and error.
BIOS will establish its West Coast hub to serve as the premier centre for neural clinical trials and R&D, and to accelerate its broader commercialisation in the US market. By setting up a centre dedicated to real-time neural research for clinical trials, BIOS aims not only to scale up operations and reach more patients faster, but to also create an ecosystem of clinicians, pharmaceutical and medical device companies, and clinical trial partners around this new capability in accessing and understanding neural data. It will also enable BIOS to partner with leaders in clinics, more rapidly commercialise its technology in the clinical environment, and better serve pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and healthcare partners in the United States.
BIOS chose Bakersfield for its proximity to large customers, access to talent, efficient operational costs, and its existing network of innovation and medical research. In particular, KVG, a partner and existing investor in BIOS, is attracting leading deep tech companies to the area to establish the industries of the future, and has extensive experience in accelerating their growth there. KVG, Kern County, and the City will also bring together their existing networks of local research organisations and large healthcare systems to facilitate the work of the centre.
Emil Hewage, CEO of BIOS Health, said: “We are excited to be creating the infrastructure, alongside our regional, clinical and commercial partners, to deliver a new future for precision medicine development. This investment is in reaction to the massive and unmet demand for more effective and affordable clinical trials. Our adaptive dosing technology can offer a new type of clinical trial in which we observe and interpret the neural response of patients in real-time. Soon, treatment decisions that used to take months, or even prove to be impossible, will be available to clinicians and patients at their fingertips.”
David Higdon, co-founder and managing director of Kern Venture Group, said: “BIOS Health is leading us into a new era of precision neural insight, much like how reading DNA transformed medicine, and continues to do so. We see the potential to transform Bakersfield and the Central Valley with BIOS by establishing a critical mass of researchers, trials, and experts in the area. The potential really is unbounded for impact and for growth.”
Jenni Byers, interim director, City of Bakersfield’s Economic & Community Development Department: “BIOS’s work is unique and has the potential to transform modern medicine as we know it today. Bakersfield is a prime West Coast location with an abundant labor force, robust job training programs, and has the resources to support BIOS’s growth. We are confident that our support of BIOS will be an important investment in Bakersfield’s and BIOS’s future.”
Jim Damian, chief economic development Officer in Kern County, said: “Kern County is thrilled to partner with the City of Bakersfield and Kern Venture Group to welcome BIOS Health Ltd’s West Coast Hub to Kern County. This new business will not only generate quality jobs within our growing biotech and artificial intelligence sectors, but will support our region’s ambition of being the best place in California to start and grow a business.”
Lord David Prior, former chair of NHS England and investor in BIOS, said: “There is a huge backlog in clinical trials in part because they do not have the insight needed into how their therapies are affecting patients’ nervous systems or the means to adjust the dosing to reduce side effects. BIOS Health’s technology is a game-changer that will be able to reduce that backlog and accelerate better therapies through to clinical trial success so more patients are able to benefit faster.”
