Clinical Study Demonstrates Viability of NeuraLight’s Digital Biomarker Platform to Evaluate and Monitor Parkinson’s Disease Progression

A cross-sectional study led by Professor Ruth Djaldetti, renowned neurologist and expert in Parkinson’s disease and movement disorders and head of the Movement Disorders Center at Rabin Medical Center, presents the use of NeuraLight’s oculometric measurement platform as an adjunct tool for clinical assessment in people with Parkinson’s disease.

Today, the clinical assessment of Parkinson’s disease (PD) severity relies primarily on the Movement Disorder Society-Sponsored Revision of the Unified Parkinson’s Disease Rating Scale (MDS-UPDRS) motor score (part III). Though widely accepted as the gold standard for PD rating, the subjective-in-nature scale has a high inter- and intra-rater variability that presents challenges for neurologists and researchers aiming to correctly assess disease status and progression and measure the effectiveness of novel disease-modifying therapeutics

Using proprietary computer vision and deep learning algorithms, NeuraLight’s platform extracts dozens of oculometric measures (OMs)—eye movements—from standard web camera facial video and translates them into objective measurements of neurodegenerative disease. The benefit of evaluating eye movement abnormalities via OMs to assess various neurological disorders, including PD, has been studied extensively.

“NeuraLight’s technology enables us to assess the patient’s neurological status in a sensitive and objective way,” shared Prof. Ruth Djaldetti, Head of the Movement Disorders Center in the neurological department, Rabin Medical Center, Israel. “The results of this study mark an important step on our path to knowing more about our Parkinson’s patients’ disease status, and we hope to continue our efforts to harness NeuraLight’s platform in our clinical practice.”

Published in the Journal of Neural Transmission, the study, “Oculometric measures as a tool for assessment of clinical symptoms and severity of Parkinson’s disease,” examined 215 Parkinson’s patients with varying levels of disease severity using the MDS-UPDRS and NeuraLight’s novel software-based platform. The main results of the study are:

• Significant differences were found in multiple OMs between Parkinson’s patients and healthy controls, replicating previous research results that Parkinson’s disease has an effect on eye movements
• Significant differences in OMs were found between patients with severe compared with mild to moderate disease, suggesting that these measures vary with stage of disease
• Correlations between NeuraLight’s oculometric test results and clinical assessment were found, presenting the potential to use this test as an adjunct tool for patients’ evaluation
• The study reinforces the potential for OMs to be used to assess and monitor patients with Parkinson’s disease as a potential novel surrogate measure of disease progression

The publication of this study coincides with the initiation of NeuraLight’s PALOMA (Parkinson’s Longitudinal Oculometric Measurement Assessment) trial, a first-of-its-kind, multi-center longitudinal study that will evaluate a planned cohort of 300 Parkinson’s patients using NeuraLight’s oculometric platform.

The aim of the study is to demonstrate that NeuraLight’s technology is able to detect patient deterioration faster than currently available subjective clinical rating scales, thereby allowing researchers and pharmaceutical manufacturers to run smaller, faster, less costly clinical trials. The study will additionally investigate novel prognostic indicators, which may enable innovative screening and precision-medicine applications for Parkinson’s disease. NeuraLight announced the first patient was enrolled and evaluated at the end of August.

To learn more about NeuraLight’s technology or the studies outlined in this release, please visit: NeuraLight.ai/Technology.

About NeuraLight
NeuraLight is on a mission to transform the lives of billions of people impacted by neurological disorders by digitizing neurological evaluation and care. Its AI-driven platform integrates multiple digital markers to accelerate and improve drug development, monitoring, and precision care for patients with neurological disorders. The technology driving the platform includes proprietary deep learning algorithms which automatically extract a host of digital oculometric markers from facial videos captured with a standard webcam, supporting distributed trial design. NeuraLight’s founders are repeat entrepreneurs and industry veterans leading a 35-strong team. The company is supported by renowned neurologists and two Nobel laureates as well as a stellar Scientific Advisory Board, and have raised over $30.5M to date.

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