Will Cortica’s EEG Deal Predict ABA Response? If so, it Could Revolutionize The Field of ABA

SAN DIEGO – Cortica, the physician-led autism provider that says it serves more than 20,000 patients a year, has agreed to explore pairing AI developer Neumarker’s EEG model with its de-identified clinical data to find brain-activity patterns that predict how individual children with autism respond to treatment.

The companies announced the strategic collaboration agreement on Oct. 15. Neumarker describes its technology as a large-scale EEG foundation model; EEG records the brain’s electrical activity through electrodes on the scalp. The announcement did not disclose the model’s training data, financial terms, a research timeline, or the treatments it will study.

“Children with autism can respond differently to the same interventions, yet clinicians today have limited objective tools to help predict treatment response,” said Ken Wang, Neumarker’s co-founder and CEO, in the announcement. He called the partnership an opportunity “to extend our platform into autism and other neurodevelopmental conditions.”

Neumarker’s Record

Neumarker, which issues its announcements from Mountain View, Calif., describes itself as venture-backed. Its website does not name individual investors, but Foothill Ventures, a Los Altos, Calif., venture fund, lists Neumarker among its portfolio companies. According to Neumarker’s biographies, Wang has about 20 years of startup experience in semiconductors, sensors, and medical devices, and co-founder and chief technology officer Qiang Li spent 20 years on Santa Clara University’s computer engineering faculty.

The company’s lead application, NMK-001, is in development for epilepsy. A Neumarker-funded abstract presented at the American Epilepsy Society meeting in December 2025 drew on 280 people with newly diagnosed focal epilepsy, but each drug-response model was tested on a subset of 33 to 86 patients using internal cross-validation. The authors called the results preliminary and said they plan to validate them with EEGs from other hospital systems. A fuller version posted to medRxiv in October 2025, which has not been peer-reviewed, notes that the study excluded people with autism spectrum disorders, so its findings do not establish that the approach can predict treatment response in autistic children.

In a May 2025 preprint that has not been peer-reviewed, Neumarker-funded researchers grouped 215 adults from an earlier antidepressant trial, EMBARC, by their pretreatment EEG patterns, then compared how each group responded to sertraline and to placebo. Nearly two weeks after the Cortica deal, on Oct. 28, Neumarker announced a depression collaboration with an unnamed health system it described as the largest in Northern California. The work will include a prospective study of whether its technology can predict which patients respond to transcranial magnetic stimulation, a noninvasive depression treatment.

What Cortica Brings

Cortica, founded in 2017, says it employs more than 2,300 clinicians and delivers coordinated medical, ABA, and developmental care. Forbes reported in August that Cortica runs 27 clinics in eight states. The company has announced more than $250 million in financing from backers including CVS Health Ventures, Optum Ventures, Ascension Investment Management, and Morgan Health.

Forbes also reported that Cortica delivers less than half what it called the standard volume of ABA hours, while treating co-occurring conditions such as sleep disorders and seizures. Cortica’s website says it sets no minimum number of ABA hours and instead writes each child an individual therapy prescription.

Cortica uses that model in value-based arrangements with health plans, which it says reduce costs from “ABA overutilization,” unnecessary medications, and avoidable hospitalizations. Its research arm, the Cortica Innovation Network, says it holds “one of the largest longitudinal datasets in neurodevelopmental care.” CEO Neil Hattangadi said the partnership could help clinicians “deliver the right interventions to the right children at the right time.”

“Our goal is to discover measurable patterns of brain activity that help explain this variability and predict treatment response.” – Kevin Shapiro, M.D., Ph.D., Co-Director, Cortica Innovation Network (2026)

What the Announcement Leaves Open

Researchers have studied EEG measures in autism for years. In May 2019, the FDA accepted a letter of intent for the N170, an EEG measure of how the brain processes faces, studied by the Autism Biomarkers Consortium for Clinical Trials, into its Biomarker Qualification Program. NIMH called it the first biomarker for a neurodevelopmental or psychiatric condition accepted into the program. A letter of intent is the first of three review stages, not final qualification or approval for clinical use.

The companies call the agreement an exploration and say the work will follow applicable patient privacy and research requirements. The announcement reported no autism treatment-response results or study milestones, and it did not say whether response to ABA would be among the outcomes studied.

AT A GLANCE

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