24 October 2019
PureTech Health plc
PureTech Affiliate Sonde Health Appoints David Liu as CEO
PureTech Health plc (LSE: PRTC) ("PureTech"), a clinical stage biotechnology company dedicated to discovering, developing and commercialising highly differentiated medicines for dysfunctions of the Brain-Immune-Gut (BIG) axis, is pleased to note that its affiliate Sonde Health has appointed healthcare technology leader David Liu as chief executive officer and a member of its board of directors. After over a decade pioneering novel online products with America Online (AOL), David has served in executive roles in growth-stage digital health and education enterprises targeting international markets, including Quartet, an enterprise technology healthcare company, and Knewton, a leading global education technology company.
Eric Elenko PhD, chief innovation officer at PureTech said: "David's experience guiding companies through significant growth positions him as a valuable addition to Sonde's team as they pioneer a new approach to healthcare."
The full text of the announcement from Sonde Health is as follows:
Sonde Health Appoints David Liu as CEO
BOSTON, October 24, 2019 - Sonde Health Inc., a leading company developing a voice-based technology platform to measure health when a person speaks, today announced that David Liu has joined Sonde as chief executive officer and a member of its board of directors. This appointment follows the recently announced $16 million Series A financing directed to advance Sonde's capability across multiple health conditions and device types as well as its commercialisation activities.
"Sonde Health's vocal biomarker technology has the potential to fundamentally transform the way we monitor and manage our health and well-being. David's wealth of experience at the intersection of healthcare and technology along with his significant executive and entrepreneurial experience position him perfectly to take Sonde to the next stage of growth," said Edward Kliphuis, investment director at M Ventures and board director at Sonde Health. "The board and I are thrilled to have David lead and further strengthen Sonde and its talented team."
"A new wave of technology powered by voice is upon us, and its application in healthcare has already begun to streamline functional tasks such as researching providers, scheduling appointments, and updating medical records," said Mr Liu. "Sonde is at the forefront of taking voice technology beyond those tasks to potentially improve people's health outcomes by analysing vocal biomarkers combined with machine learning. I'm excited to join Sonde and work with Jim Harper, our co-founder and COO, as we continue to progress our platform as a fast, reliable, and non-invasive health check built into widely used smartphone, voice assisted, and telemedicine technologies."
Sonde's vocal biomarker platform has demonstrated the potential to effectively detect disease using information obtained from an individual's voice on commonly-owned devices, such as smartphones and smart speakers, and it has the potential to fundamentally change the way mental and physical health is screened and monitored.
Mr Liu brings a wide range of leadership experiences across consumer internet, education technology, and digital healthcare to his role. He most recently served as president and chief operating officer at Quartet, a growth stage enterprise healthcare technology company that connects primary care physicians with mental health providers to improve overall health outcomes for patients and generate significant savings for payors. Before Quartet, Mr Liu was president and chief operating officer at Knewton, where - from an early stage - he helped to build a leading global education technology company that uses artificial intelligence to personalise digital learning materials for K-20 students to improve individual learning outcomes. Mr Liu began his technology career with a decade at AOL Inc., where he successfully led multiple product areas and launched the original AOL.com portal as an internal start-up.
Mr Liu recently served as an entrepreneur-in-residence at Weill Cornell Medicine (WCM), where he evaluated developing technologies in therapeutics, diagnostics, devices and digital healthcare.
About Sonde Health
Co-founded by PureTech Health (LSE: PRTC), Sonde Health is developing a voice-based technology platform to measure health when a person speaks. Sonde's proprietary technology works by sensing and analysing subtle changes in the voice to create a range of persistent brain, muscle, and respiratory health measurements that provide a more complete picture of health in just seconds. To date, Sonde has collected a leading digital biobank containing millions of data points comprising voice samples and health metadata from over 20,000 individuals as part of the ongoing validation of its platform. Sonde has broad intellectual property coverage worldwide, currently owning or having exclusive rights to eight patent applications and three issued patents in five families of patent filings.
About PureTech
PureTech is a clinical stage biotechnology company dedicated to discovering, developing and commercialising highly differentiated medicines for devastating diseases, including intractable cancers, lymphatic and gastrointestinal diseases, central nervous system disorders, and inflammatory and immunological diseases, among others. The Company has created a broad and deep pipeline through the expertise of its experienced research and development team and its extensive network of scientists, clinicians and industry leaders. This pipeline, which is being advanced both internally and through PureTech's affiliates, is comprised of 24 product candidates and one product that has been cleared by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). All of the underlying programmes and platforms that resulted in this pipeline of product candidates were initially identified or discovered and then advanced by the PureTech team through key validation points based on the Company's unique insights into the biology of the brain, immune, and gut, or BIG, systems and the interface between those systems, referred to as the BIG Axis.
For more information, visit www.puretechhealth.com or connect with us on Twitter @puretechh.
Forward Looking Statement
This press release contains statements that are or may be forward-looking statements, including statements that relate to the company's future prospects, developments, strategies and expectations regarding Mr Liu's role at Sonde. The forward-looking statements are based on current expectations and are subject to known and unknown risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results, performance and achievements to differ materially from current expectations, including, but not limited to, those risks and uncertainties described in the risk factors included in the regulatory filings for PureTech Health plc. These forward-looking statements are based on assumptions regarding the present and future business strategies of the company and the environment in which it will operate in the future. Each forward-looking statement speaks only as at the date of this press release. Except as required by law and regulatory requirements, neither the company nor any other party intends to update or revise these forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.
