Finnish startup Neuro Event Labs has announced raising €3.9 million from Hadean Ventures, SHS Capital and Maki.vc. The funds will be used to support the commercial expansion of its lead product Nelli, which is revolutionizing epilepsy treatment with its AI-powered diagnostics, and overall offering more personalized, accurate and scalable diagnostics.
Currently, around one-third of epilepsy patients continue to have seizures regardless of treatment, and 30% of diagnosed epilepsy cases are later disproved by newer methods. Neuro Event Labs, founded in 2015, aims to step in with a new solution involving video and sensor monitoring, which makes sure doctors can see what is happening at the precise moment a patient starts to have a seizure, even at night.
Jukka Peltola, Medical Director and co-founder of Neuro Event Labs and Professor of Neurology, explains more: “Epilepsy is one of the most common neurological disorders, affecting over 65 million individuals worldwide. To provide optimal treatment, it’s crucial to be able to clearly define the type and frequency of seizures, which often occur during the night. However, a current diagnosis of neurological disorders mostly relies on subjective and unreliable data resulting in a high misdiagnosis rate.”
Up until now, there hasn’t been a technology that allows patients to be monitored at home and produces enough reliable data without causing discomfort or disrupting everyday activities. Currently, epilepsy diagnosis is dependent on hospital visits and only 5% of patients are subjected to Video EEG examinations.
Neuro Event Labs’s AI-powered epilepsy diagnostic, which is based on video and audio recordings, can be collected from either the patient’s home or in hospital. By collecting high-quality data of the seizures, Neuro Event Labs can more efficiently detect and identify the type of seizure the patient suffers from and, therefore, offer more personalized treatment.
Nelli also provides doctors with an interactive report that can be reviewed by the clinical team via a web-based application, helping to cut back on manual work and decrease the chances of human error.
“Neuro Event Labs is a perfect example of helping patients and society by improving the standards of care while decreasing costs for the healthcare system as a whole,” commented Ville Skinnari, minister for Development Cooperation and Foreign Trade of Finland.
Nelli is already CE-marked and has been launched for regular clinical use at 20 leading European hospitals, and in collaboration with hospitals in the US. In addition to expanding to across Europe and the US, the team states that in the future its technology will be applied to other neurological disorders such as Parkinson’s, Sleep Apnea and Cerebral Palsy.
