Raises $21.5 Million in Series B Financing; Funds to Accelerate Commercialization of EarliPoint Evaluation and Further Product Development
Summary
EarliPoint is the first personalized, quantifiable, and objective tool for children aged 16 months to 30 months suspected of having autism.During an EarliPoint evaluation, children watch videos of social interactions on a portable tablet, and the embedded biomarker tracks how the child focuses on the scenes, proxies expert clinician diagnosis, and assesses the level of function on the core characteristics of autismsocial disability, verbal ability, and non-verbal learning.There is a severe unmet need in autism diagnosis, and families often face a challenging path to diagnosis of autism due to the lack of innovation in the space and limited access to expert clinicians, said Ami Klin, Ph.D., Chief Clinical Officer and Founder of EarliTec, Director of Marcus Autism Center and Professor and Chief at Emory University School of Medicine. We can reduce the time-consuming process of administering and documenting an objective diagnosis and assessment of autistic children, so they can receive effective treatment, said Tom Ressemann, Chief Executive Officer of EarliTec. Through studies correlating looking behavior with clinician-based diagnostic and developmental reference standard measures, EarliPoint Severity Indices quantify levels of social disability, verbal ability, and non-verbal learning. The companys initial product, the EarliPoint Evaluation, is the first objective measurement tool that clinicians can use to aid in the diagnosis and assessment of autism in children as young as 16 months. Constantino, J. N., Abbacchi, A. M., Saulnier, C., Klaiman, C., Mandell, D. S., Zhang, Y., Hawks, Z., Bates, J., Klin, A., Shattuck, P., Molholm, S., Fitzgerald, R., Roux, A., Lowe, J. K., & Geschwind, D. H. (2020).