Ieso taking US by storm with online AI mental health treatment

ieso chief science and strategy officer, Dr Andy Blackwell, who invented the concept, tells Business Weekly that the company's Velora technology – built over a decade of ground-breaking science - is starting to pay off handsomely.

Dr Blackwell says: “We’re continuing to build out partnerships in the US, as that remains our primary focus for now. We’re seeing particularly strong interest from organisations looking to tackle the psychological and behavioural drivers of high-cost chronic conditions, especially in areas like gastrointestinal disorders and chronic pain.

“Most of these services have very limited access to mental-health support, so using AI to deliver evidence-based psychological input is resonating. We’re increasingly confident it will improve adherence to treatment programmes, reduce hospital admissions and, ultimately, lessen suffering across a wide range of conditions.

“At the same time, consumer use of general-purpose Large Language Models has exploded, which means the big players are racing to make these systems safer and more clinically reliable. It’s a pretty wild time in mental-health AI.

“On our side, we’re also starting to see the real power of AI - not just as a delivery tool, but as a way of conducting mental-health science itself. There’s a genuinely new paradigm emerging - less 'AI chatbots' and more 'AI clinician-scientists' capable of generating and testing hypotheses at scale.”

As we revealed at the start of September, around a billion people globally suffer from some form of mental disorder out of a global population of just over 8.1bn - but clearly there are nowhere near enough mental health professionals in the field to get anywhere near one-to-one treatment of sufferers.

After a decade of studied and thoroughly tested incubation ieso decided to roll out its AI based solution ‘Velora’ to patients throughout the United States and later all over the world.

Dr Blackwell 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.

Velora 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 has advanced 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.

Basically, the technology decodes and democratises the treatment of conditions affecting mental health. Mental health issues catapulted to public attention during Covid and Dr Blackwell says we are witnessing an incredibly important watershed 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.

By 2030, Dr Blackwell 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.