DECEMBER 20218"It's hard to overstate how important finding a reliable, affordable, and easy-to-use diagnostic is for stopping Alzheimer's." This is the stark claim made in 2019 by Bill Gates taken from his blog GatesNotes. Two years on, perhaps this is more relevant than ever. In June of this year, the biotech Biogen won approval from the FDA (U.S. Food and Drug Administration) for a new drug, Aducanumab, a full two decades since the last significant advancement of note. Two decades of lost progress to treat a disease that over 40 million people worldwide live with and die from. It is the 3rd leading cause of mortality in people over 65­behind cancer and heart disease. By 2050, over 12.7 million people are projected to have Alzheimer's in the U.S.­that is, the population of New York City and Los Angeles combined. So why the lack of progress? One of the critical issues is that of diagnosis. The development of new therapeutics requires the full phases of clinical trials, and to complete these involves identifying patients who have the disease, but at an early enough stage for the potential treatments to have a positive impact before irreversible damage has taken place. For conditions such as Alzheimer's or dementia, this represents a significant hurdle as symptoms are typically only evident during the later stages when the pathology of Alzheimer's may have been underway for 20 years before this point. The most recognized way to diagnose Alzheimer's is through a lumbar puncture, a brain scan, or a PET scan to screen for the Beta-Amyloid protein; however, the former is intrusive, painful, and carries a degree of risk, and the latter is expensive. This testing is likely to happen for many patients once they are showing symptoms, at which stage the disease is expected to be too advanced for treatment to have a significant impact.While there have been advancements in early-stage diagnosis in blood tests, these tests cannot assess cognition and brain alterations in specific regions involved with various neurocognitive disorders. What if there was a way to diagnose and measure cognition with an affordable, accurate, accessible, culturally independent, and non-invasive test? The technology currently being developed and deployed by ViewMind enables this and can detect Alzheimer's in the preclinical stages when beta-amyloid deposits first appear in the brain­around 20 years HOW DIGITAL BIOMARKERS ARE DRIVING FORWARD OUR FIGHT AGAINST COGNITIVE DISEASELeesa Soulodre, MiM MBA, General Partner, R3i VenturesByDigital tools gather vital health data, including digital biomarkers, which provide valuable insights when formulating personalized treatments, predicting health-related outcomes, and enabling reactive and preventative actionsIn My Opinion
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