Background

As the population lives longer, clinical neurodegeneration such as mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and Alzheimer Disease (AD) become more prevalent. Our clinical objectives center around solving this growing crisis.

We need earlier identification and earlier treatment to efficiently delay or halt these progressive and debilitating disorders that start decades before symptomatic evidence.

Unfortunately, there are no known methods to objectively track cognitive decline and the standard of care is defined by poorly sensitive pen-and-paper subjective assessments.

Vistim Labs addresses this need with convenient biomarkers to that predict and track cognitive decline in individuals such that early detection and monitoring is available for effective disease management.

Objective

At Vistim Labs, we measure cognitive decline to enable rapid assessment of patient conditions, to accelerate diagnosis as well as to measure the efficacy of emerging treatments as they pertain to clinical outcomes.

We appreciate the difficulty of tracking neurodegenerative disorders. Measuring individual biomarkers such amyloid deposits in the brain provides a narrow lens for understanding a patients conditions, making these unsuitable for measuring efficacy of treatment.

Vistim Labs believes that the ideal solution tracks how neurons misfire in the brain when tested against common tasks such as visual processing. And we’ve designed our products to predict known biophysiological biomarkers such as amyloid alongside changes in functional cognitive brain activity to support clinical decision-making in ways compatible with the existing standard of care. In this way, researchers and clinicians are best equipped to understand their patient populations and perform effective and proper care.

Rationale

In the case for Alzheimer’s Disease, recognized biomarkers exist, such as amyloid protein build-up in the brain; however, use of these biomarkers remains controversial as amyloid presence is not always linked to clinical outcomes. This places incredible burden on researchers and providers who wish to help patients enjoy fulfilling lives. Additionally, diseases like Parkinson’s, TBI, and Schizophrenia lack such biomarkers.

Vistim Labs’ functional assessment can already be used as a multiplexing tool and used alongside more traditional positron emission tomography (PET) and cerebral spinal fluid (CSF) samples. We and our collaborators, across multiple clinical trials, have demonstrated predictive power over amyloid standardized uptake values (SUVR) measured by PET and other biomarkers of disease such as tau proteins via CSF. We also have results showing a correlation between visual event related spectral perturbations (ERSP) elicited by our proprietary electroencephalography (EEG) and cognitive assessments such as MMSE, CERAD, and TASIT. Please read our publications for more.

The Vistim Labs solution is a non-invasive, portable, affordable, artificial intelligence (AI) platform that makes it easier to show how emerging treatments affect symptomatic onset such as notable cognitive decline. This means we can help enroll qualified participants in interventional studies and help show how an intervention interferes with the natural progression of a neurodegenerative disease and its effect on symptomatic evidence.

Up Next

Vistim Labs collaborates with partners in the United States, Latin America, and Europe to increase the clinical meaning of our technology. The purpose of our collaborations is to further validate our method against biomarkers being studied such as PET, CSF, blood, and cognitive endpoints in larger and heterogeneous populations and alongside cognitive assessments. We also seek to expand our clinical utility to other disease categories, including with more evidence in Parkinson’s, TBI, and Schizophrenia.

With further study, we seek to provide an effective clinical tool and approved medical device with demonstrated prognostic ability that can be used in the asymptomatic general population to determine the earliest signs of cognitive decline. In this way, we will know who is at risk for developing neurodegeneration and when a therapy is optimally instituted. We also want to support therapeutic design such that therapies can be optimized for the individual patient with an effective feedback loop using our technology to assess improvement.

Our ability to support off-the-shelf EEG also means that we can provide these services to companies that might not have access to more expensive methods. This device will be available worldwide in offices for general practitioners, geriatricians, and other physicians handling cognitive complaints. And we will empower research institutions around the world with greater abilities to study neurodegeneration.