Belfast-headquartered Cumulus Neuroscience has raised ￡6m in a financing round led by the Dementia Discovery Fund, with the funds set to be used to advance its integrated physiological and digital biomarker platform.

The latest financing round included new investments from the medical research charity LifeArc as well as the UK Future Fund.

Cumulus’ platform is being co-developed with ‘leading pharmaceutical companies’ with the aim of providing clinical trial data as well as artificial intelligence (AI) powered insights to speed up the development of new central nervous system (CNS) therapies.

The platform is designed to improve neuroscience trials by enabling more objective and precise assessment of drug candidates within a shorter timeline.

It captures large amounts of real-world lab-quality data, including frequent, longitudinal measurements of brain activity synchronously with a comprehensive range of functional and symptomatic domains.

Cumulus has also developed an at-home EEG headset that can objectively probe neuronal integrity, network connectivity as well as the strategies that the brain uses to compensate for neuronal damage.

The platform also provides AI-based data analysis to enable the detection of relevant changes in patients in order to produce ‘fast and meaningful’ insights, Cumulus said in a statement.

“We are delighted that DDF and LifeArc share our mission, addressing the clear need for more effective tools to provide the critical clinical trial data and analysis needed to improve the successful delivery of new CNS therapies to patients,” said Ronan Cunningham, chief executive officer of Cumulus.

“This funding will allow us to build on the ground-breaking advances we have made in remote, frequent monitoring of brain activity and cognitive function in the home, in partnership with leading developers of digital biomarkers. We believe our integrated next generation platform can improve the execution of clinical trials by yielding significant time and cost savings, adding meaningful value to the next generation of CNS therapies,” he added.