New Peer-reviewed publication: NeuraLight Biomarkers Reveal What Parkinson's Gold-Standard Measurement Scale Misses in a Study Led by the Scale's Own Developers
Read the paper on Pharmaceutical Medicine
- Peer-reviewed paper on a landmark multicenter study spanning 280 patients in five countries found that NeuraLight biomarkers significantly outperformed the MDS-UPDRS, the gold standard in tracking the progression of Parkinson’s disease
- These findings demonstrate that NeuraLight’s biomarkers increase the likelihood of success in Parkinson’s disease-modifying trials by helping ensure effective therapies are not missed by conventional measures
NeuraLight, a healthtech company providing precision biomarkers quantifying change in brain function, today announced a new peer-reviewed publication in Pharmaceutical Medicine, a leading journal in drug development, that establishes NeuraLight’s biomarkers as reproducible measures of Parkinson's disease progression. NeuraLight’s biomarkers were sensitive enough to detect change where the MDS-UPDRS, the field's current gold standard for measuring Parkinson’s disease progression, did not.
The study was led by two developers of the MDS-UPDRS: Prof. Olivier Rascol, Chair of France’s national clinical research network for Parkinson’s disease, and Prof. Christopher G. Goetz of Rush University Medical Center, former president of the International Parkinson and Movement Disorder Society. The study was co-authored by a distinguished group of leading movement disorders clinicians and researchers.
Despite decades of investment, no therapy has been approved to slow Parkinson's disease. The MDS-UPDRS relies on clinician scoring that varies across raters and sites, often masking progression signals which drug trials are designed to detect. In the peer-reviewed publication, NeuraLight’s biomarkers captured disease progression in Parkinson’s patients where the MDS-UPDRS did not, demonstrating their potential to improve sensitivity to change, enable more efficient clinical trials, and increase confidence in detecting true treatment effects.
The study followed 280 patients with Parkinson's disease across two clinical trials: the PALOMA study, conducted at four clinical centers in the US, Spain, Portugal, and the UK, and the PDHF study in Israel. Following the patients longitudinally, NeuraLight’s biomarkers detected a clear and reproducible signal of disease progression across cohorts and sites. In the same patients over the same time frame, longitudinal MDS-UPDRS assessments did not demonstrate comparable sensitivity to progression.
The reason MDS-UPDRS missed the signal is structural. The MDS-UPDRS is dependent on a clinician who is scoring patients on tasks like finger tapping and walking, introducing variability across raters and sites that can mask the subtle progression signals drug trials are designed to detect. Unlike MDS-UPDRS, NeuraLight's biomarkers produced a consistent signal across all sites and raters.
NeuraLight’s precision biomarkers quantify changes in brain function through objective measurements of eye movements. One of NeuraLight's leading biomarkers, ASH (Amplitude of Saccadic Hypometria), quantifies how accurately the eyes reach visual targets, providing a direct functional readout of basal ganglia circuitry, the central driver of Parkinsonian motor symptoms. In the paper, ASH showed significant deterioration in Parkinson’s disease patients across two independent cohorts (P-value < 0.0001), and these findings were highly consistent across sites, demonstrating strong reproducibility. In contrast, MDS-UPDRS III, scored by clinicians at the same sites over the same period, did not reach statistical significance.
By generating objective and reproducible measures of brain function, NeuraLight’s biomarkers have the potential to improve sensitivity to longitudinal change, enabling more efficient clinical trials and increasing confidence in the detection of treatment effects.
“NeuraLight’s biomarkers have been successfully incorporated into a number of Parkinson’s drug trials, where they demonstrated the ability to detect subtle changes that are generally undetectable when using clinical gold standards,” said Prof. Rascol, who led the trial.
"No treatment has been approved to slow Parkinson's, partly because measuring progression reliably enough to detect a real drug effect has been one of the field's hardest problems. This paper shows that longitudinal progression can be captured with the consistency and reproducibility that disease-modifying trials require,” said Edmund Ben-Ami, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of NeuraLight. “It was a privilege to co-author this work with Prof. Goetz and Prof. Rascol, two of the developers of the MDS-UPDRS clinical scale itself. Our vision is a future where every CNS trial can detect what's happening to patients, and where therapies that work reach them faster."
The paper, "Changes in saccadic hypometria over time to monitor Parkinson's disease progression," is currently in press at Pharmaceutical Medicine here. The trials were registered at ClinicalTrials.gov NCT05795023 and NCT05862649.