Debra Borchardt
Psychedelic medicine biotech company MindMed (OTCQB: MMEDF) will acquire HealthMode, a digital medicine and therapeutics startup that uses Artificial Intelligence (AI)-enabled digital measurement to increase the precision and speed of clinical research and patient monitoring.
MindMed said it will acquire HealthMode through the issuance of 82,508 multiple voting shares of MindMed (equivalent to 8,250,836 subordinate voting shares which, at yesterday’s closing price of CAD $5.13, puts the value of HealthMode at approximately CAD $41,254,180) and the payment of approximately CAD $300,000 in cash.
MindMed Co-Founder and CEO J.R. Rahn said: “Our mission is to make MindMed as much a digital medicine company as a drug development company. With the addition of Dan and Bradford’s team of engineers and product experts, our digital medicine division, Albert, is now the Special Ops of digital medicine, applying machine learning to drug development and patient care. The future of modern mental healthcare and psychedelic medicine ultimately will rely on improving infrequent, self-reported and observed measures for mental health to a paradigm where the continual digital measurement of our mind and body is as vital as the drug treatment itself. In effect, we see a future mental health treatment paradigm where potential drug products such as our LSD experiential therapy might be prescribed right alongside software application programming interfaces (APIs) to prepare the patient for treatment and optimally monitor the after-care of one’s anxiety disorder.”
What HealthMode Brings
The acquisition will give MindMed access to HealthMode’s Intellectual Property, platforms for clinical drug trials, and its entire twenty-four-person digital medicine team. MindMed said it will incorporate HealthMode’s machine learning (ML) engineering, product development, and operations employees based in Silicon Valley, New York City, Bratislava and Prague into its newly established digital medicine division, Albert. MindMed intends to establish Albert as a full-stack digital mental health platform, capable of launching and commercializing psychedelic-assisted therapies and medicines at scale for patients.
MindMed will add pharmaceutical veteran Daniel R. Karlin M.D. M.A. and AI/ML expert Bradford Cross to the MindMed executive team. Cross, who will become the Chief Technology Officer of MindMed, was a founding partner at deep tech venture capital fund, Data Collective (DCVC) and also founded Prismatic, a personalized AI-driven news feed that became part of the IP underlying Linkedin’s newsfeed and content classification.
HealthMode Co-Founder Dan Karlin said, “Through the tech we have built at Healthmode, we aim to potentially rapidly increase the value of MindMed’s asset portfolio by advancing more drugs against more indications at a faster pace with high scientific and technical rigor.”
Co-Founder Bradford Cross added: “At HealthMode, our technical motto has always been ‘better science faster’ because we always try to think about what our tech can do to answer real scientific questions by capturing more and better data from increasing patient populations at higher frequency and at a larger scale. Now we’ll apply that playbook to accelerate research on one of the most promising targets in psychiatry and ultimately help launch these psychedelic-assisted therapies to patients at scale.”
