BBK Worldwide partners with tech firm on apps to monitor neurological disease

Jun 28, 2016 

Apptomics has developed an app to test patients with Parkinson's disease.

An app to monitor patients with Parkinson’s disease will be tested in a clinical trial in September thanks to a new partnership between Needham patient recruitment firm BBK Worldwide and a maker of mobile apps called Apptomics.

BBK Worldwide, an 80-employee firm that helps recruit patients for clinical trials, also announced it’s become a minority investor in Needham-based Apptomics, which has five employees. Matthew Stumm, a BBK principal, has been appointed to Wellesley-based Apptomics’ board of directors. The companies didn’t disclose any specifics of the deal.The goal of the partnership between the two companies will be to develop a suite of mobile apps for patients with chronic neurological conditions and their caregivers and doctors. Apptomics has already developed iMotor and MyPD to record motor function, emotional status, sleep quality, medications, symptoms, compliance and side-effects, and to share that data with their neurologists. The result, the company says, is “more accurate clinical assessments, faster optimization of treatment regimens, and reduced overall healthcare costs.”

“A steady rise in neurological diagnoses is contributing to deteriorating patient care and an increased burden on a limited number of providers,” said founder and CEO Georgia Mitsi of Apptomics. “Validated digital solutions like ours are critical to bridging today’s healthcare gaps, and I look forward to working with BBK during this next phase of Apptomics’ growth.”

Apptomics has already completed two studies that prove the scientific validity of its Parkinson’s disease app, iMotor, to accurately discriminate Parkinson’s disease from healthy volunteers, and to detect the effects of treatment. In September, BBK and Apptomics will launch a one-year controlled trial to establish wheher it has an impact on disease management and health of Parkinson’s patients.

On Monday, BBK presented updates to its existing mobile app platform, called TrialCentralNet, at a conference in Philadelphia. The platform can be used to help any clinical research or healthcare organization to develop custom mobile apps in weeks, rather than months, at a fraction of the cost of in-house development.

Don Seiffert writes about the life sciences industry, including biotech, the drug industry, medical devices and diagnostics.

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