Cumulus Neuroscience licences P1vital Product’s facial expression recognition software for use in CNS trials

First published: 5th January 2021

Cumulus Neuroscience and P1vital Products have signed a multi-year worldwide licensing agreement to integrate P1vital’s Facial Expression Recognition Task (FERT) software into Cumulus’ next generation integrated physiological and digital biomarker platform for CNS disorders.

P1vital’s FERT allows a well-validated objective assessment of how someone processes emotional information and can provide an indication of current mood. It is used widely in both clinical trials and healthcare settings to provide an early detection of treatment response.


“Particularly in dementia, it is vital that researchers have robust markers and real-world evidence in order to find ways to assess new treatments and address the many unmet needs faced by patients.”

Jonathan Kingslake
CEO of P1vital Products Ltd

Cumulus’ platform will integrate P1vital’s FERT to assess emotional bias in neurological clinical trials, adding to the Company’s broad, integrated capability to provide robust and meaningful real-world trial data and AI-powered insights to accelerate the development of life-changing CNS therapies. The platform enables frequent, remote multi-domain sampling outside of the clinic. The integrated domain assessment technologies have been carefully designed for low patient burden and repeated use, and extensively field-tested by hundreds of users over thousands of hours in patient and control populations.

Cumulus Neuroscience’s CEO Ronan Cunningham commented: "This agreement with P1vital adds yet another cutting-edge technology to Cumulus’ diverse platform. By combining the leading Facial Expression Recognition Task capability with the other tools in our suite – including speech, sleep and cognition analysis – we can potentially address many of the challenges inherent in CNS clinical trials, and ultimately accelerate the development of new medicines for patients."

Jonathan Kingslake, CEO of P1vital Products Ltd, added: “CNS remains one of the most difficult areas in which to conduct clinical research, so we’re delighted to partner with Cumulus to put our FERT technology to use in these challenging conditions. Particularly in dementia, it is vital that researchers have robust markers and real-world evidence in order to find ways to assess new treatments and address the many unmet needs faced by patients”

P1vital is a leader in computerised behavioural testing in clinical trials for mood and other psychiatric domains. The company specialises in the development of evidence-based experimental medicine tools that support early, low cost, biomarker-inspired proof-of-mechanism and/or proof-of-concept studies of target compounds.

The P1vital FERT assesses the recognition of facial emotions. Faces with six different basic emotions (happiness, fear, anger, disgust, sadness, surprise) are briefly displayed on the screen and participants are required to indicate the expression of the face via a button-press. Different intensity levels of each emotion are presented, which increases the ambiguity of the facial expression and the sensitivity of the task.

The FERT is used widely in both clinical trials and healthcare settings to provide an early detection of treatment response. It has been field tested with more than 2000 patients in multiple ePRO studies both in-clinic and at-home. For more information, visit www.p1vital.com