The Neuroscientist Who Turned a Brain Game Into a Prescription Drug
In December 2025, the FDA cleared a prescription digital therapeutic called LumosityRx - marketed under the clinical name Prismira - for adults with ADHD. It uses cognitive games. It runs on a phone. And getting it to this point required the kind of randomized controlled trial that pharmaceutical companies build entire departments around: 500+ participants, 13 U.S. clinical sites, 9 weeks, a 97% completion rate. The man who built that trial, who assembled the division that ran it, and who now runs the whole company is Bob Schafer.
Schafer is a neuroscientist first. He finished a PhD at Stanford, completed postdoctoral work at MIT, and published original research in Science and Neuron - journals that do not hand out bylines easily. The natural next step for someone like him would have been a faculty appointment, a lab, a slow accumulation of citations. Instead, he founded a startup.
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Bob Schafer, CEO of Lumos LabsProphecy Sciences, his Y Combinator W13 startup, took the same neuroscience logic that fills academic journals and aimed it at a resolutely practical target: hiring. The company built its own biosensor hardware - headsets with infrared sensors, eye tracking, pupil dilation measurement, heart rate monitors, skin conductance pads - to administer 30-minute cognitive assessments that couldn't be coached or gamed. Because, as Schafer put it plainly at the time, "its assessment uses biosignals like heart rate, its assessment can't be tricked in the same way" as a standard interview. Sports teams, finance firms, and tech startups paid a few hundred dollars per candidate. It was genuinely unusual and, in some ways, ahead of its moment.
In 2015, Lumos Labs - the San Francisco company behind Lumosity - acquihired Prophecy Sciences. Schafer joined not as a figurehead but as a working researcher. He spent four years building out the science function before being named Chief Science Officer in 2019. Two years after that, in 2021, he launched Lumosity DTx, an entirely new division of the company focused on regulated, clinical-grade digital therapeutics. The ADHD program was its first major project.
The clinical case for LumosityRx rests on the GAMES Study - a randomized, double-blind, sham-controlled trial that looked and behaved like a pharmaceutical Phase III. Participants in the treatment arm used LumosityRx for about 15 minutes a day over nine weeks. Blinded clinicians assessed them throughout. At the end: statistically significant improvement on the TOVA (a standardized attention test), a meaningful signal on the Clinical Global Impression-Improvement scale, and 44.2% of participants achieving clinically meaningful attention gains. The sham group received game-play therapy that looked similar but lacked the therapeutic mechanism. The difference was real and measurable.
In May 2023, Lumos Labs appointed Schafer as CEO, with predecessor Krishna Kakarala moving to Executive Chairman. The promotion was, in context, inevitable - Schafer had been the architect of the company's most significant strategic evolution. What was once a consumer subscription app for brain puzzles was becoming, under his direction, a platform for FDA-regulated medical products. The scientific heritage of Lumosity - 100 million users, 130-plus peer-reviewed publications - gave the clinical work something most medical device startups lack entirely: a massive, longitudinal behavioral dataset and a research track record built over 15 years.
With LumosityRx, we're taking the core science and technology behind Lumosity and applying it to help people with ADHD, where attention is crucial to everyday life.
Bob Schafer, on the FDA clearance of LumosityRx - December 2025The FDA clearance in December 2025 was the payoff on a years-long bet. Lumos Labs had raised $70.6 million over its life, with a $31.5 million Series D in 2012. In the decade that followed, it had to navigate a 2016 FTC settlement over marketing claims, rebuild its scientific credibility, and make the case to regulators that a phone app could meet the evidentiary bar for medical clearance. It cleared that bar. The clinical name, Prismira, signals how seriously the company is treating this: it's not Lumosity-for-doctors, it's a distinct regulated product with its own trial data, its own clinical positioning, and a prescription requirement.
Schafer's path - from academic neuroscientist to biosensor entrepreneur to research executive to company CEO - is one of the more unusual in digital health. Most companies in this space either start with a scientist who figures out business later, or a business person who hires scientists. Schafer is the rare case where the scientist learned to run the business without surrendering the scientific rigor. The GAMES Study's 97% completion rate is not just a good headline; it reflects an understanding of how to design something that patients actually use.
What comes after LumosityRx is the open question. Lumos Labs has done research across 20 clinical populations, including stroke and traumatic brain injury. The infrastructure that produced one FDA-cleared therapeutic - the research team, the trial management capability, the regulatory relationships - can be redeployed. For a CEO who has been building toward this moment since he first attached biosensors to job candidates in 2012, the prescription is just the beginning.