Clinical Science at Vistim Labs

Background

As the population lives longer, neurodegenerative disorders such as mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and Alzheimer Disease (AD) become more prevalent.

There is a need for early identification and early treatment to enable delaying or halting of these progressive and debilitating disorders that start decades before symptomatic evidence.

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

Vistim Labs seeks to address 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 seek to measure cognitive decline to enable measuring the efficacy of emerging treatments as they pertain to clinical outcomes.

We appreciate the difficulty of tracking neurodegenerative disorders. Measuring common biomarkers such amyloid deposits in the brain can be poor indicators of cognitive decline making them unsuitable for measuring efficacy of treatment.

Vistim Labs believes that the ideal solution is a medical device that predicts known biophysiological biomarkers such as amyloid alongside changes in functional cognitive brain activity. In this way, researchers and clinicians are best equipped to understand and stratify their patient populations.

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.

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 two clinical trials, have demonstrated predictive power over amyloid standardized uptake values (SUVR) measured by PET. We also have preliminary 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.

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 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, blood, and CSF in larger and heterogeneous populations and alongside cognitive assessments.

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 mild cognitive impairment and AD and when a therapy is optimally instituted. This device will be available worldwide in offices for general practitioners, geriatricians, and other physicians handling cognitive complaints.