AppliedVR taps Komodo Health to prove out its VR therapeutic for chronic pain

As virtual reality solutions pick up speed in healthcare, VR therapeutics startup AppliedVR is teaming up with health data unicorn Komodo Health on clinical research to validate its flagship product.

Leveraging Komodo Health’s artificial intelligence platform, which aggregates de-identified healthcare data from hundreds of sources, AppliedVR will conduct research into the efficacy, cost savings and health system value of its RelieVRx product for chronic pain.

The therapeutic, formerly dubbed EaseVRx, received de novo clearance from the Food and Drug Administration in November for the treatment of chronic lower back pain. AppliedVR had announced a $36 million series B round just days prior.

The collaboration with Komodo Health allows AppliedVR to better understand the impacts of its therapeutic in the patient care journey at large, including the product’s relationship to real-world clinical encounters and signals like surgery rates, chiropractic visits and opioid prescription volumes.

“With the power of the Komodo platform, we are gaining important insights into the value that RelieVRx delivers beyond the patient-reported outcomes collected from clinical trials, and we are quantifying the impact we can deliver for stakeholders across the industry,” said Josh Sackman, president and co-founder at AppliedVR, in a statement. “Komodo has already proven to be invaluable as both a technology and a thought partner, helping us to combine the power of decentralized trials with robust data and technology to demonstrate clinical and economic value as we make this new category of immersive therapeutics available to patients in need.”

The startup also plans to launch a four-arm clinical study including three trial cohorts and one synthetic control arm using Komodo’s real-world data.

The synthetic control arm will include a de-identified patient cohort drawn from Komodo’s dataset that is statistically comparable to the trial patients without having to recruit additional participants.

“AppliedVR is at the cutting edge of pain management, not only developing innovative technologies but applying comprehensive research rigor to prove the value of the therapy for those suffering from chronic pain,” said Komodo Health president and co-founder Web Sun. “This partnership marks a massive step forward in validating the efficacy of virtual reality as an important alternative in chronic pain treatment. It’s also a powerful example of the accelerated innovation that’s possible through a cloud- and digital-first approach to addressing unmet patient needs.” 

Komodo Health’s AI-powered real-world data platform, or “healthcare map” as the company calls it, offers real-time views into patient healthcare journeys so payers and life sciences companies can identify care disparities and conduct interventions.

The health tech unicorn hinted it would dive into new areas of tech in January in comments to Fierce Healthcare.

“What you can expect to see from Komodo is continuing to push innovation with more applications and more technology services that allow companies to really jump into this work of improving the burden of disease,” co-founder and CEO Arif Nathoo, M.D., told Fierce Healthcare during this year’s J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference.

The company also inked a partnership with the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative in January to give patient advocacy organizations access to its software and analytics tools for rare disease research.

Komodo Health is preparing to go public by June or July, Axios reported last month, even as health tech’s IPO rate has stalled so far in 2022.

“We believe that our mission and thesis is something that the public markets need to hear and they need to have the ability to invest in. We believe very strongly in that,” Nathoo told Fierce Healthcare in January. “And so over the course of this year, you’ll expect to see us take steps to get closer to the public markets.”

The company’s latest funding round, at $220 million raised in March 2021, boosted the company’s valuation to $3.3 billion.