4.28.23-Korea-Empatica

IVAN CENCI: Hello everybody. My name is Ivan Cenci. I'm General Manager at Empatica, an MIT Media Lab spinoff, where Rosalind Picard, our co-founder, is a professor. So this is our connection with MIT.

So let's start with a problem, which is reducing costs in clinical trials. A report by the HHS, the Health and Human Services department in the United States, shows that 8 to 13% of the costs in clinical trials, depending on the phase of the trial, can be reduced by implementing digital technologies. At Empatica this is exactly what we do. We try to reduce costs and also support decentralized trials thanks to our connected technology.

So let's talk a little more about our product, which is a medical product, a platform in particular, composed by four components. One is the watch-- I'm wearing it right now, which is a medical device able to collect physiological data from the body. Then we have an app called Care App able to get the data from the watch and push it to the cloud.

On the cloud the data is processed to provide insight and other information to the scientist. And this information can be accessed through a web portal, software as a service, where you can check compliance, you can enroll patients, and so on. Let's focus a little bit more on the hardware.

I won't focus much on the characteristics. We can talk about it later. But I want to mention that this is one of the world's most advanced wearables, to collect clinical grade data from everyday life. We have a large experience in developing hardware. We consider it our biggest asset, maybe only after data and data processing. And we know well how scientists and patients need it to be effective, to be comfortable, and to be convenient.

To this extent we were awarded by institutions and also design firms for our work. A dual focus on raw data and biomarkers, here is the long list, I won't focus on it in particular. But I can say that we just released also an actigraphy biomarker, which is a standard in clinical trials to measure sleep and physical activity during the data collection process. And we can also develop custom biomarkers, together with our pharma partners or institutions, for specific diseases.

What about operations? We know very well how difficult it is to run clinical trials, to enroll patients, to guarantee compliance. And we have a dedicated team, clinical operations team, with program managers to support our clients in even multinational data collection trials, to be successful in their endeavors.

We also take very seriously SOPs, documentation, and security. We have security ISO certification. And we can work with very large pharma companies that have very strict policies.

A little glimpse on what we support, we have thousands of clinical trials and dozens of medical applications. Here is the list. But, yeah, we support much more. Let's say we are disease agnostic. With our raw data we can support a lot of different studies.

Also, these are some of our clients. As I said, we work with large institutions, governmental agencies, pharma companies and hospitals. I will bring an example. We worked a few years ago with Synovium, an American pharma development company that now is part of Sumitomo, a Japanese group. We worked on a Phase IV clinical trial for Aptiom, a drug used to treat epilepsy. And we were part in digitalizing data collection and also developing a biomarker.

I will also share a little more inspiring project. It's a science research project, where two teams participated into a ski expedition to the South Pole collecting physiological data to study metabolism and other parameters. And funny enough, I was part of it. And I took part in one of the expeditions.

So this is basically it, what we are here for. We are here to look for new clients in the local market, to adopt our platform and develop new drugs or around clinical trials. Thank you very much.