Mind Medicine (MMED.E) leaps into the 21st Century with artificial intelligence digital medicine startup, Healthmode

Mind Medicine (MMED.E) announced today their intended acquisition of digital medicine and therapeutics start-up, Healthmode, according to a press release.

The acquisition brings access to HealthMode’s intellectual property, as well as platforms for clinical drug trials along with its entire 24-person digital medicine team. The company’s platform uses artificial-intelligence to enact digital measurement to increase the precision and speed of patient monitoring and clinical research.

“MindMed has led the way in innovating toward solutions for mental health, including cutting-edge drug targets and psychedelic-assisted therapies. I’ve worked toward solving these same problems at Pfizer and my other medical and tech start-ups and believe that there is critical work urgently needed to advance treatment of mental illnesses, with particularly rich opportunities in the psychedelic-inspired space. The acuity and importance of unmet mental health needs is why we believe so strongly in empowering data-driven solutions, which will more efficiently enable us to generate evidence of efficacy and safety for new psychiatric treatments. 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 rigour,” said Dr. Daniel R. Karlin, incoming chief medical officer for Mind Medicine.

MindMed will immediately put HealthMode’s machine learning engineering, product development and employees based in Silicon Valley, New York, Bratislava and Prague into their new digital medicine division, Albert. Albert is to be the company’s full-stack digital mental health platform, used for bringing psychedelic therapies and medicines at scale for patients.

The company is also welcoming a handful of medical and tech experts to the fold to help them with the Albert rollout. These include Dr. Karlin, who worked in Pfizer’s neuroscience research unit, and is board certified in psychiatry, addiction medicine and clinical informatics. Also, artificial-intelligence and machine learning expert Bradford Cross, who will be sitting in the chief technology officer chair. Cross was a founding partner at deep tech venture capital fund Data Collective (DCVC) and also a founder of Prismatic, an AI-driven new feed, which later ended up absorbed by LinkedIn as part of the IP underlying the social media site’s news feed and content classification system.

“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 health care 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,” said J.R. Rahn, MindMed’s co-founder and CEO.

MindMed will acquire HealthMode for 82,508 multiple voting shares (the functional equivalent of 8,250,836 subordinate voting shares, at $5.13, for a total value of $41,254,180) and $300,000 in cash.