Cordio CEO Tamil Tal
Cordio
Israel-based health tech company Cordio has developed machine learning software that can be downloaded to smartphones to prevent heart patients from being hospitalized.
○someday in the futurePatients at risk for heart failure may find themselves waking up in the morning, opening their smartphones and saying things like: David is a great chef. Jeff plays the guitar. “
This is a simple daily habit that can save a patient’s life. This is because one day after a repeated daily diet, a doctor may be notified that the patient is at risk of heart failure if he is not treated immediately.
That’s the dream of Tamil Tal, founder of Israel-based artificial intelligence startup Cordio. The company’s HearO app uses machine learning algorithms to detect changes in a patient’s voice that suggest fluid buildup is occurring in the lungs before the patient is aware of any symptoms. Early detection allows doctors to administer drugs and prevent the patient’s condition from deteriorating to the point of needing to go to the hospital.
“This situation has become the Holy Grail of the remote monitoring industry,” said Tal, 50. “Patients don’t feel it, so find a way to identify them when hospitalization is near.”
Millions of Americans are at risk of congestive heart failure, a condition in which the heart muscle is too weak to pump all the blood the body needs. As a result, fluid builds up in the extremities and lungs and can lead to serious complications requiring hospitalization if left untreated. Early detection saves people from having to go to the hospital, but heart failure is often difficult to diagnose until it is severe.
“There is certainly an unmet need for heart failure,” says William Abraham, a cardiologist at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center. “One of which is to closely monitor heart failure patients remotely to know when fluid builds up in their lungs and puts them at risk of hospitalization.”
Clinical studies to date have shown that the app can predict these events in patients about 80% of the time. The company said the studies were conducted in Israel and have received approval for app marketing from European and Israeli regulators. The company said it is aiming for marketing approval with the FDA as a breakthrough device after completing its current US-based clinical trial in a larger, more diverse population.
Abraham, who is currently conducting clinical trials for the company, said that if the results bear fruit and the app hits the market, it will offer a unique solution to the heart failure market. “What’s interesting about this product is its simplicity and elegance, and its readiness for widespread adoption by heart failure patients,” he says. “You don’t need any hardware or devices in your home. All you need is your smartphone.”
“Everyone talks about artificial intelligence, machine learning and remote diagnostics, but this company had it all.”
B.Originally from Israel, Tal started his career as a lawyer specializing in financial transactions, including M&A and venture capital investments. He started in 2007 as his COO of Neovasc, which manufactures medical devices for heart patients. He says the position sparked his interest in medical devices.
In 2010, Neovasc was acquired by Medical Venture Corp and left the company. In 2017 he joined Cordio as CEO. The company was founded in 2013 by Aviv Lotan, Sigal Kremer-Tal, Ze’ev Schlik, Chaim Lotan and Shelley Lotan and went through an incentive incubator program run by the Israeli government.
According to Tal, the inspiration for the Cordio app came from co-founder and cardiologist Chaim Lotan. He and his colleagues found that when patients had too much fluid in their lungs, they could actually hear it. But generally it was too late at that point to prevent going to the hospital. So the idea behind the Cordio app is to see if the software can detect these voice changes faster.
One of the key features of the machine learning side of the app is that it uses phrases featuring a wide range of sounds to record a baseline of phrases when the patient is known to be fluid free. . This baseline helps the algorithm detect changes. Changes are also read out in the morning, as fluid accumulation is more likely to be detected when the patient has been lying down and asleep for several hours.
After taking over as CEO, Tal hired Ilan Shallom as Chief Technology Officer. Shalom has been doing speech recognition research since his 1980s and founded the speech recognition company NSC in 1993. NSC was then acquired by AudioCodes in 2010. “I was courting him for a long time,” says Tal. “It took about a year, longer than his wife.”
S.The company has raised about $25 million to date from Peregrine Ventures, Ceros Financial Services and other investors. Tull said the company will likely raise another round of funding this year to get the product through the FDA approval process and begin commercializing it.
For Ceros Financial CEO Mark Goldwasser, investing in his company was a clear vision of how to implement his technology in a way that was more than just hype. “Everybody talks about artificial intelligence, machine learning, remote diagnostics, and this company had it all,” he says.
The company is currently in the final stages of recruiting for its final US clinical trial, which will be conducted at 30 sites across the country, providing an opportunity to see how the app works for a diverse range of patients. becomes. Assuming good results from those trials, Tull says his company is aiming to obtain his FDA clearance by the second quarter of 2024. .
If the technology proves effective in congestive heart failure, the company plans to extend its voice recognition technology to other diseases. For example, for COVID-19 and COPD patients who are at risk of hospitalization, we are testing predictive software that can spot potential problems before a visit is needed. But he sees each as a separate challenge, not necessarily just a line of code in the app, and plans his company’s strategy accordingly.
“I think the biggest difference between us and other digital health companies is that we think like a medical device company,” says Tal. “We developed the product and started working with doctors early on to understand what they needed.”
