Precision biomarker company’s Scientific Advisory Board includes multiple Nobel Prize winners and the creators of current gold standard in Parkinson’s disease progression
CAMBRIDGE, Mass., AUSTIN, Texas & TEL AVIV, Israel–(BUSINESS WIRE)–NeuraLight, the leader in developing precision biomarkers for neurological disease, today announced that Prof. Thomas Südhof, a Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist and one of the world’s leading Alzheimer’s disease researchers, has joined its Scientific Advisory Board. This follows the announcement that world-recognized neurologist Prof. Olivier Rascol, a co-creator of the current gold standard for measuring Parkinson’s disease progression (MDS-UPDRS), will head the board.
The unparalleled collective clinical expertise of the board will strengthen NeuraLight’s validation-first strategy, which has already produced movement-based progression measures with 10x more sensitivity than MDS-UPDRS. Each member will help to advance NeuraLight’s clinical validation roadmap, support pharmaceutical trial integration and guide the company’s expansion of precision progression measurement at scale. The full board is composed of:
- Prof. Thomas Südhof was a 2013 Nobel laureate for his work on the mechanism of synaptic transmission. He currently heads the Südhof Lab at Stanford University. At NeuraLight, where he also holds the title of Scientific Co-founder, he oversees the scientific foundations of the company’s biomarkers and supports the continued advancement of their work in Alzheimer’s disease and other neurological indications.
- Prof. Olivier Rascol brings more than 30 years of leadership in Parkinson’s disease clinical research and deep expertise in motor progression, disease modification and clinical trial design. His work has helped shape how progression is measured and how treatments are evaluated in neurodegenerative diseases. A professor of clinical pharmacology at Toulouse University Hospital, he led promising recent research on the use of GLP-1 to treat Parkinson’s disease. At NeuraLight, Prof. Rascol will guide scientific strategy and help expand the clinical utility of the platform as it continues scaling its precision biomarkers across therapeutic areas.
- Prof. Alvin Roth has worked widely on market design, including in health care, for which he won the 2012 Nobel Prize in Economics. He is a professor of economics at Stanford University. He is supporting NeuraLight with market design, helps structure value-based partnerships with healthcare stakeholders and advises on overall ecosystem strategy.
“We are thrilled and honored to welcome some of the world’s most recognized and impactful scientists to the board. They will be invaluable in advancing NeuraLight’s clinical validation strategy and pharmaceutical partnerships,” said Edmund Ben-Ami, NeuraLight’s CEO and co-founder. “We see this as further confirmation that our platform can truly transform the way disease progression is measured.”
NeuraLight harnessed a century’s worth of research on the brain-eye movement connection to build a 10-minute assessment, conducted on a standard tablet, that delivers biomarkers with the ability to detect disease changes that traditional methods cannot. The platform is currently deployed in clinical partnerships across the globe, spanning over 1,200 patients with Parkinson’s, ALS, MS and Huntington’s disease, as well as in multiple commercial pharmaceutical trials.
“I have been impressed by the quality of NeuraLight’s validation data,” said Prof. Rascol. “Clinical scales are useful but often noisy, and imaging is costly and complex. That’s why I’m excited by NeuraLight’s eye-movement biomarkers; they provide objective, quantitative measures of disease severity and can detect subtle changes in disease progression missed by traditional clinical assessments.”
Working closely with the board to support NeuraLight’s clinical strategy are several key scientific advisors:
Cristina Sampaio, Chief Medical Officer for the CDHI Foundation (Cure Huntington’s Disease Initiative Foundation), is one of the foremost experts on movement disorders and clinical pharmacology. She is a Professor of Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics at the University of Lisbon.
Prof. Fred Lublin, a widely known authority on the treatment of MS, serves as director of the Corinne Goldsmith Dickinson Center for Multiple Sclerosis at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York.
Dr. Chris Goetz, co-creator of the MDS-UPDRS, is a leading expert in movement disorder pharmacology and rating-scale development. He is a professor and director of the Movement Disorders Program at Rush University Medical Center.
About NeuraLight
NeuraLight is a healthtech company transforming neurology with precision biomarkers. The NeuraLight platform addresses the core challenge of accurately monitoring neurological disease progression. Our unprecedentedly accurate biomarkers enable better targeting of underserved patient populations for existing therapies and facilitate the development of new treatments by de-risking drug trials, increasing their efficiency, and accelerating timelines. NeuraLight’s biomarkers play an essential role in multiple commercial partnerships, and are endorsed by leading neurologists, Nobel Laureates, and key research foundations. Learn more at neuralight.ai.
Contacts
Keren Sharon, Product Marketing Manager, [email protected].
