Portuguese digital health company iLoF has received around 1.5 million euros from the UK’s state innovation agency “Innovate UK” to research a treatment for Alzheimer’s disease, it was announced today.
The deep tech company, based in Porto, said in a statement that it will use its Artificial Intelligence (AI) platform to support research into effective treatments for Alzheimer’s disease.
The Optomics® platform, developed by iLoF, contains a non-invasive process of clinical analysis, using a technology that combines photonics with the massive analysis of multimodal data.
According to the company, “the platform will be used in Bio-Hermes-002, an international study that is revolutionizing Alzheimer’s research and treatment, and is the most ambitious investigation into this disease to date”.
iLoF was selected for this clinical study through Innovate UK’s “Contracts for Innovation” programme, which supports public sector organizations in finding answers to complex challenges by funding new technological solutions.
The Bio-Hermes-002 research is led by the Global Alzheimer’s Platform Foundation (GAP), an American organization dedicated to accelerating the availability of innovative therapies for neurological disorders, and is currently taking place in more than 30 clinical centers in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom.
In this study with more than a thousand participants, digital and blood biomarkers are being used to help expand scientific knowledge about the disease.
“The data extracted will be processed by iLoF’s Optomics® platform, which is able to shorten analysis periods and revolutionize the extent of information provided, providing more rigorous, personalized human patient screening,” the company points out.
The company stresses that the integration of this platform into Bio-Hermes-002 promises to “improve patient stratification, potentially reducing screening errors in clinical trials and improving the efficiency of Alzheimer’s disease research”.
“By operationalizing and making available a faster, more accurate, and lower-cost biomarker analysis, iLoF’s technology converges with the study’s objective: to accelerate the development of an advanced treatment and diagnosis for Alzheimer’s disease,” he stresses.
In a disease that still has no cure available for the general population, early diagnosis of Alzheimer’s is crucial, as it allows affected individuals to take measures to mitigate its progression, he adds.
Digital and blood biomarkers predict how brain pathology is related to tau proteins and amyloid, currently measured by PET scans (positron emission tomography).
“These screenings and comparisons could offer more efficient and less invasive alternatives for diagnosing dementia,” says the company, adding that this research aims to include a diverse range of individuals, from mild cognitive impairment, to moderate Alzheimer’s disease, to cognitively normal controls.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), every year there are 10 million new diagnoses of Alzheimer’s, a degenerative cognitive disease with no cure, identified as the seventh leading cause of death worldwide.
The World Health Organization estimates that 55 million people over the age of 65 in the world have dementia, which manifests itself in various forms, with Alzheimer’s being the most common, projecting 139 million by 2050.