Background

As people live longer, clinical neurodegeneration such as mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and Alzheimer Disease (AD) become more prevalent. Unfortunately, these diseases are not well managed, as treatment plans are currently based on guesswork lacking any possible way to evaluate effects of therapy.

The world desperately needs a reliable solution for detecting and identifying these debilitating disorders before symptomatic evidence. More importantly, we need a way to see when a therapy is working and when it isn’t working.

There are many different types of tests for detecting these diseases but these methods are inaccessible and unreliable for routine monitoring. Additionally, these tests do not correlate well with each other, so misdiagnosis and mistreatment are common problems, that are not discovered until it’s too late.

Vistim Labs addresses this need with a brain map solution that maps the areas affected by disease and tracks all relevant disease endpoints for effective disease management.

Objectives

We appreciate the difficulty in treating neurodegenerative disorders without knowing when therapies are working. So, our primary objective is to create an effective feedback loop so physicians can quickly test different therapies and immediately know when a therapy is having desirable effects.

The ideal solution should track how neurons misfire in the brain so patterns of disruption can be used to understand how disease progression is being changed through intervention.

Our first objective is to measure all established clinical endpoints in a single test, so that routine monitoring becomes a practical reality. This includes producing full resolution PET images based on EEG recordings.

Our second objective is to introduce a new imaging technique where brain maps reveal subtle differences between dementia subtypes so physicians can more accurately understand which disease they are attempting to treat and target direct effects of therapy rather than indirect markers like amyloid accumulation.

Our third objective is to enable physicians to immediately prescribe the most effective treatment for the patient in their first visit. We will do this by tracking how patients respond to treatments over time so we can precisely match new patients to the most similar profiles in our database. In this way, we can anticipate which treatments will be the most effective for new patients and the best possible therapy can be prescribed right away.

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. Across multiple clinical trials, we have already 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. We are also excited to have preliminary evidence that our technique may be more accurate than PET for diagnosis. Please read our publications for more.

Our active clinical studies will evidence our ability to differentiate disease subtypes and produce full resolution PET estimates for new patients. Please stay tuned to more updates.

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.