Winterlight Labs, Inc. Enters Collaboration with Johnson & Johnson Innovation to Develop a Digital Biomarker for Diagnosis of Early Stage Alzheimer's Disease
TORONTO, Jan. 7, 2019 /PRNewswire/ - Winterlight Labs, Inc., a JLABS @ Toronto-based company, announced today that it has entered a collaboration with Janssen Pharmaceuticals, Inc. ("Janssen"), one of the Janssen Pharmaceutical Companies of Johnson & Johnson. The agreement was facilitated by Johnson & Johnson Innovation LLC. The collaboration will initially focus on developing a sensitive digital biomarker that can distinguish patients with mild cognitive impairment, an early stage of Alzheimer's Disease (AD), from healthy elderly subjects.
Winterlight Labs has developed technology that extracts 500 features from speech and language and uses artificial intelligence (AI) to create disease-specific digital biomarkers. Winterlight's current digital biomarker for AD is 91% accurate in distinguishing Alzheimer's from healthy aging using two minutes of speech.
Research has increasingly focused on developing treatments for AD in its earliest phases, when pathological changes have started to occur in the brain, but cognitive decline is not yet evident. It is this period of time at which therapeutic intervention has the greatest chance of providing a meaningful benefit to the patient. To date, this pre-symptomatic period cannot be detected with traditional tests of cognitive function, and a key future goal is to identify AD patients prior to the emergence of symptoms, to allow treatment to be initiated when patients are still cognitively healthy.
"Early intervention is critical to slowing or halting disease progression in patients with AD," said Liam Kaufman, CEO, Winterlight Labs. "We're excited to work with Janssen to help advance a novel digital biomarker that will enable early intervention and potentially help to extend the quality of life for individuals afflicted with AD."
About Winterlight Labs
Winterlight labs' mission is to create quicker and more objective ways to measure neurological and psychiatric illness through speech using artificial intelligence. Winterlight's fully automated and compliant platform is currently being used by pharmaceutical companies to detect dementia sooner, measure response to therapy and track symptoms remotely. Winterlight is a resident company of Johnson & Johnson Innovation, JLABS, a premier life science incubator program. Visit http://winterlightlabs.com for more information.
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