As
I wrote yesterday, Mahana Therapeutics has recently licensed from King’s College London an “innovative digital therapeutic”—a web-based program delivering a course of cognitive behavioral therapy to patients with irritable bowel syndrome. A
page on the Mahana site promoting this web-delivered IBS-CBT program furthers the impression that this deal is steeped mostly in hype.
A
January 10th press release announcing the deal declared the changes in symptoms produced by the web-based program to be “substantial,” which already seemed like an exaggeration. The company’s website has apparently upgraded this observation with its description of the symptom improvements as “dramatic and potentially game-changing for patients.” Wow!
(It should be noted that Professor Rona Moss-Morris of King’s College London, one of the principal investigators of the study that road-tested the web-based program being licensed,
has been paid as a consultant by Mahana and also owns stock options. Her ownership of Mahana stock options was not in the disclosure for
the study of the web-based program but in her disclosure for
a separate trial for people with persistent physical symptoms. Incidentally, that paper about the other trial had to be corrected last year after I pointed out that it included a false claim concerning the estimated costs of so-called “medically unexplained symptoms”–a claim based on a misreading by Professor Moss-Morris and her co-authors of a seminal study in their field of expertise.)
