Meet the Designers Hoping to Treat ADHD and Alzheimer's with Gaming

Could a doctor treating ADHD or Alzheimer's one day prescribe a video game? Eddie Martucci and Matthew Omernick think so -- and the cofounders of Boston-based Akili Interactive Labs recently raised more than $30 million from pharma companies, government grants and investors who agree. The team's tablet-based game, EVO, guides players (er, patients) through a series of foreign worlds, where they collect stars and gems and interact with aliens. What seems like superficial play at first is actually carefully designed to improve attention, inhibition and working memory in kids with ADHD.

Where are you in the long slog to get FDA approval?

Martucci: The past four years have been about making this new kind of medicine a reality, and now we're staring down the launch. We're entering our phase-three clinical trial for our primary product, pediatric ADHD. The trial spans many sites across the country and multiple hundreds of patients. It's the first-of-its-kind drug-style study in which patients are taking home a video game instead of a pill.