Medibio Limited (ASX:MEB) CEO Jack Cosentino discusses commercialisation of the company’s Circadian Heart Rate Variability (CHR-V) technology for depression diagnosis.

Medibio (ASX:MEB) is a company that was founded here in Australia. The company specialises in a clinical decision support system using the autonomic nervous system. It identifies biomarkers for folks who are struggling with mental illness.

Initially, the company specialised in a technology that used circadian heart rhythms in looking at the autonomic nervous system, and what we do is we add our algorithm sets on top of the heart-rhythm data. What we found with the autonomic nervous system is we have the ability to be able to look at not just the heart and the head. We are now looking at biomarkers from respiration, EEG and other technology as well.

The company has designed it to detect mental illness. It also can detect down to the specific illnesses of things like unipolar and bipolar depression, PTSD, schizophrenia and other disorders as well.

Currently, we're doing our clinical trial work together with Johns Hopkins, as well as a couple other centres of excellence in the global network. We're going down the CE process quie readily right now, and we're heading into the FDA registration process. It's a de novo clearance, so we anticipate to move fairly swiftly through that process.

Strategic partnerships and agreements have been very key and critical for the organisation as we continue. A lot of agreements that we've been developing are really looking at the viability around our technology.

The market is actually a very, very untapped and very vast market. The mental illness market happens to be one of the most under-served markets. It's roughly about 350 million-plus people are struggling with some type of mental illness. And here in Australia, we spend nearly $12.6 billion in order to deal with the depression patients out there.

We just went through a raise not too long ago of about $13 million here in Australia. We're all set to go through the CE process, and quite well funded.

Our long-term ambition is to place Medibio as the leader in looking at mental illness, and being able to create clinical decision support tools that more effectively can treat and give these folks the right drug at the right time for the right person. 

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