Wednesday, January 25, 2023
Cognetivity Neurosciences Ltd., a technology company that has created a unique brain health screening platform for use in medical, commercial and consumer environments, is pleased to announce that its flagship CognICA™ tool has demonstrated effectiveness in tracking cognitive function during the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease patients with the disease-modifying therapy Aduhelm™ (aducanumab), manufactured by Biogen.
CognICA was used in clinical practice at Mediclinic Parkview Hospital in Dubai, UAE, to screen 108 patients coming into the neurology clinic for cognitive impairment. The tool was then used to monitor the cognition of the patients who received a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease and were eligible for treatment with Aduhelm, a US Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-approved drug that directly targets amyloid beta pathology.
The results showed that patients who received Aduhelm did not show cognitive decline, with two patients showing a significant improvement in cognitive performance. They demonstrate the use of CognICA as a sensitive screening and monitoring tool to support detection of cognitive impairment and measure changes in cognitive performance in response to disease-modifying therapies for Alzheimer’s.
As such, the tool is perfectly suited to support the dawning era of targeted therapies for neurodegenerative disease – as evidenced by the FDA’s approval, in the first week of 2023, of a second drug directly targeting amyloid beta pathology, Leqembi™ (lecanemab). Early detection and diagnosis will be critical to the rapid, large-scale rollout of this family of therapeutics since they have been approved for early-stage disease, in the form of mild cognitive impairment (MCI) or mild dementia due to Alzheimer’s.
Outstanding sensitivity to early-stage disease – the ability to identify changes in the brain – is CognICA’s greatest strength, as demonstrated in thousands of patients and numerous peer-reviewed publications.
Professor Derk Krieger, Director of the Cognitive Health Clinic at Mediclinic Parkview, who has overseen the research, commented on the announcement: “These are extremely exciting results, given the wider global clinical and regulatory context. Powerful, life-changing drugs are coming to market, targeted towards early-stage cognitive decline. But so far, there has been a lack of tools offering high sensitivity and ease of large-scale rollout, sufficient to support mass testing for early-stage impairment. We have shown that CognICA can function as the missing link in the chain, enabling these therapies to be connected to the millions of people who can benefit from them as we need to be smart in choosing our patients for such treatment programs.”
Dr. Sina Habibi, CEO of Cognetivity, also said: “We are delighted to have partnered with Prof Krieger and Mediclinic Parkview Hospital on this important piece of research. We are hugely excited, not just by the results themselves, of course, but by their implications of what CognICA can achieve on a global scale for millions of patients.”
