PureTech Health Notes US Patent Issuance Broadly Covering Methods of Assessing Mental and Physical Condition from Human Speech

PureTech Health plc (“PureTech Health” or the “Company”, LSE: PRTC), an advanced, clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company, is pleased to note that the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has issued U.S. Patent No. 9,763,617 for its Sonde vocal biomarkers programme. The patent broadly covers methods of assessing a mental or physical condition of a subject, using phonetic structures, or phones, extracted from speech audio waveforms. The issued patent is exclusively licensed under an agreement with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and provides coverage through at least 2032.

“This newly issued patent represents, to the best of our knowledge, the only coverage for novel vocal biomarkers that have been demonstrated to enhance vocal analysis performance for assessment of a broad range of diseases,” said Jim Harper, PhD, PureTech Health Vocal Biomarker Programme Lead. “Issuance of this patent strengthens our leading intellectual property portfolio in the emerging field of acoustic voice analysis for health, and it provides validation of our novel vocal biomarkers technology for the assessment of mental and physical conditions.”

The patented technology, created by a team at MIT Lincoln Laboratory led by Thomas Quatieri, PhD, enables analysis of subtle - yet quantifiable - changes in the voice to improve automated measures of important aspects of an individual’s health. Pilot studies using the exclusively licensed technology have also demonstrated the potential to detect and objectively measure symptoms in a range of important conditions including depression, mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI), concussion, cognitive impairment and Parkinson’s Disease. The vocal biomarkers programme (Sonde) has been integrating and extending this technology for analysis of an individual’s voice on commonly-owned devices.  Testing of the Sonde technology in over a thousand subjects has demonstrated the potential to effectively screen and monitor for disease using only a few seconds of voice. The Sonde technology is being developed to enable disease-associated features of speech to be measured without capturing the contents of speech, therefore protecting privacy. 

For more information please see the full press release attached below