David Liu, CEO, Sonde Health in an interaction with Express Healthcare talks about his company’s recent partnership with Koye Pharma. The partnership aims to develop a new vocal biomarker for COPD monitoring capabilities in India
Give us a brief about Sonde health and your roles and responsibilities there
Sonde Health has developed an enterprise vocal biomarker platform that enables any company to either license respiratory or mental fitness monitoring products or create a novel vocal biomarker product. Sonde scales data collection, feature development, model creation and clinical validation in collaboration with its partners and customers. Leveraging over 1 million voice samples from 80,000+ individuals, Sonde uses advanced audio signal processing and machine learning to sense and analyze subtle vocal changes due to changes in a person’s physiology to provide key insights into health and well-being.
I am the CEO and a Board Director of Sonde Health. Simran Kaur is our Head of Strategic Partnerships and Sales for India.
Kindly share the details of the project for which you have tied up with Koye Pharma
Our partnership with Koye Pharma is a strategic partnership designed to develop a new vocal biomarker for COPD monitoring capabilities in India. As part of this arrangement, Koye will leverage Sonde’s vocal biomarker development (VBD) platform, expanding upon its already existing respiratory responsive vocal biomarker, to create an entirely novel vocal biomarker for COPD in India. This will allow Koye to develop solutions that help monitor and treat respiratory health in COPD patients using their voice.
How far can this project prove to be a gamechanger for COPD doctors in India?
Coordinating directly with pharmaceutical companies in this capacity enables them to take a more targeted approach with prospective patients, aligning their needs with the most impactful therapeutics. While there’s no cure for COPD, this new vocal biomarker will allow physicians to better manage their patients’ symptoms using early monitoring and constant engagement to ensure those impacted by COPD get on the right treatment plans early and often. Providing an accessible digital biomarker platform that will both aid physicians in identifying and understanding their patients’ conditions and also make it easier for patients with chronic respiratory conditions to monitor their health in the least invasive way possible is game changing.
Which markets have you been catering to all these years? What is your business model?
We have been serving the US market and are now moving into Asia and Europe. We have a SaaS enterprise licensing business model.
At present, the world is witnessing a large number of diseases. Is Sonde Health working on fighting any more diseases?
In addition to respiratory conditions, like Asthma and COPD, Sonde also provides mental health monitoring with our mental fitness API for monitoring for depression and anxiety.
Amid so many pharma companies, what made you choose Koye Pharma for this project? Do you plan to partner with other pharma companies too in future for any other projects? Is there anything in the pipeline currently?
Koye Pharma is a high growth and innovative India based pharma company. We at Sonde are very keen to connect and associate ourselves with dynamic pharma companies all over the world. And yes, we are speaking with several pharma companies about working together in other health conditions.
Any message for people working in the Indian medical devices industry and its stakeholders?
Yes, we would be keen to be associated with Indian medical device industry to launch vocal biomarker for early health screening and monitoring for respiratory, mental health & heart conditions, where patients are able to easily use voice to engage in longitudinal health monitoring and connect with clinicians at the right time without delaying their treatment.