ieso AI set to revolutionise global treatment of mental disorders

Now Cambridge company ieso is rolling out its AI based solution ‘Velora’, built over a decade of ground-breaking science, to patients throughout the United States and later all over the world.

ieso chief science and strategy officer, Dr Andy Blackwell - credited for inventing the concept - is steering the push for ever more capable clinical AI systems and, alongside the company’s CEO Kent Tangen, developing game-changing commercial partnerships that will bring this new AI based model of care to sufferers.

Serial life sciences investor Dr Andy Richards is championing this ground breaking push into multi-agentic clinical AI, which has been supported pretty much from Day One by New York-registered Morningside - estimated to be worth around £430 million.

ieso's Velora product has been shown to address a range of symptoms including anxiety and worry in addition to depression and the company expects to extend the capabilities of the system so it is suitable to help all common mental health conditions in the years ahead. As the technology is readily suited to translation into multiple languages it also has the potential to serve people in need all over the world.

Based at St John's Innovation Park in Cambridge, the company is advancing talks at some pace with commercial partners across the United States and elsewhere and Dr Blackwell says the nature of the technology delivery has a number of advantages.

He says the solution negates the need for expansive and expensive physical buildings as well as a plethora of staff - not least because this new type of treatment is being delivered is through advanced and tested AI rather than physical therapists.

Dr Blackwell, a neuroscience expert, believes mental disorders will affect increasing numbers across the planet as the future unfolds and that ieso’s new product is set to play a fundamental role in addressing the ‘supply vs demand’ problem that has always created serious issues in mental healthcare.

Backed from the start by Morningside, the company has meticulously gathered and patent-protected its data and algorithms on an ongoing basis. Its deep learning-enabled research has produced radical new insights into how treatments work and and laid the foundations for a whole new generation of treatments designed to eradicate trial and error from this mushrooming branch of medicine.

Basically, the technology decodes and democratises the treatment of conditions affecting mental health. Andy trained in cognitive neuroscience and psychology at the University of St. Andrews and the University of Cambridge and has worked extensively with neuroscience labs and major pharma, biotech and medical devices companies around the world, including at Cambridge Cognition.

Mental health issues catapulted to public attention during Covid and Dr Blackwell says we are witnessing an incredibly important moment as the crisis worsens. He believes the world may have reached a crossroads – the crisis of care is worsening but game-changing new technology could bring safe and effective new solutions to families in need.

As AI capabilities continue to evolve he even believes that in the years to come we are likely to see the development of ‘therapeutic superintelligence’ – systems capable of learning through experience how to optimise the treatment of all conditions for all people.

While AI may be viewed with suspicion in some quarters, and some elements of it remain under scrutiny, Dr Blackwell says ieso has carefully built specialised AI systems that can be delivered safely and effectively. Given that most of mental health treatment is delivered in human language (unlikely other areas of medicine that involve physical and biological interventions), this is one area of medicine perfectly suited to the application of clinical grade AI language systems.

By 2030, he believes, 80 per cent of mental health technology solutions may be AI-driven. ieso's AI solutions will be available 24/7 to millions of sufferers while there could never be enough human specialists around to even begin helping such a vast volume of patients.