Cambridge Cognition: New Cloud Based Assessment Tool to Accelerate Development of Alzheimer’s Treatments

Reliable cognitive measures for patients with Alzheimer's disease are essential when testing potential new drug interventions. The high attrition rate in Alzheimer’s disease clinical trials highlights the need for more sensitive analytical tools to be used throughout the drug development process. Global science and technology company Cambridge Cognition has made a significant advancement towards this goal; today announcing a powerful new cognitive assessment product that brings efficacy testing of Alzheimer’s treatments into the digital age.

Cantab Connect Alzheimer’s provides touchscreen iPad assessment of patients with mild to moderate Alzheimer's disease enabling drug developers to measure the cognitive impact of potential new drug treatments accurately and consistently in each stage of clinical development. This new cloud-based system is more sensitive to cognitive effects than traditional paper-based measures such as the commonly used ADAS-cog or Mini Mental State Exam. Therefore, the likelihood of detecting disease modifying capabilities and positive signals is increased and the opportunity for effective new treatments to be identified is maximized.

While more sensitive assessments are a necessary and welcome improvement, it is the proprietary technology behind these assessments that provide the more immediate benefits to the pharmaceutical industry. A new era of cloud computing promises to make faster and more efficient clinical trials a reality. Instant data capture, automatic test scoring and instant online access to secure global data gives sponsors visibility of their study anytime, anywhere helping to accelerate the time to completion and inform decision making during development. Automated and delivered with voiceover instructions, the Cantab Connect Alzheimer’s test panel can be administered consistently by site staff without doctoral qualifications in neuropsychology and is language and culture independent, enabling the collection and analysis of data rapidly and efficiently from multinational clinical trial sites.

Improved data collection enables important distinctions in patients’ conditions to be made more quickly and with greater accuracy. The in-built data management features help to ensure clean and accurate data, further enhancing the quality of study results. By applying these technological and scientific advances to clinical trials in Alzheimer’s disease, sponsors could achieve notable cost savings in each phase of development.

Dr Kenton Zavitz, Director of Clinical Affairs, expects Cantab Connect Alzheimer’s to have a real impact on drug development: "For years, research in Alzheimer’s disease has relied on measures which are not sensitive enough to detect positive cognitive effects in patients, especially at the earliest proof-of-concept stages of drug development, limiting sponsors’ chances of establishing the efficacy in their compounds. Cantab Connect Alzheimer's gives sensitive and specific measurement at every stage of drug development, vital for pharmaceutical companies working to identify safe and effective treatments. With the innovation of cloud technology paired with acutely sensitive cognitive measures, drug developers can now perform objective, consistent and meaningful research to combat the disease as quickly as possible. ”

Notes to editors:

Cambridge Cognition is a global science and technology company, developers of the world’s leading neuropsychological tests and providers of expert scientific services.

The Company supports thousands of universities, pharmaceutical companies, biotechs and healthcare providers with products and services to improve mental health research, accelerate the development of safe and effective treatments and detect the earliest signs of cognitive impairment in patients.

www.cambridgecognition.com

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