Kaplan explained that consumers can do a lot more to improve their brain health in this period of time before irreversible damage takes place. “As a result of this focus on getting to a drug, finding a drug - which is incredibly important, and we don’t want to lose sight of it - we have overlooked a really important body of scientific evidence coming out of Europe, US, other places that have shown that it’s possible to actually prevent cognitive decline using very specific changes in diet, exercise, cognitive training, managing your sleep, and managing your stress levels,” Kaplan said.ĭiseases like Alzheimer’s, she explained, begin 20 to 25 years before one experiences symptoms. While many are focused on finding a drug for Alzheimer's, Kaplan said there's other important work to be done too. The offering will launch in private beta next month and in the spring, Kaplan said Neutrotrak will begin a clinical study with a cohort of 300 people to test the offering. The company’s other product, which will work in conjunction with Imprint, is a web or app-based cognitive health intervention program that aims to help improve a user’s cognitive health. We have very complex algorithms that are built on assessing your novelty processing and curiosity. Once the test is complete, all of that data will get uploaded to our server. How much time do you spend looking at images you have already seen before? How much time are you looking at ones that you’ve never seen before? And collecting as much data around that as possible. “We are trying to understand where are you looking, what are you looking at, and what are you curious about. “We are assessing the health of your hippocampus,” Kaplan explained. Finally, users start to see novel images, which is when the real testing begins. She explained the identical images are imprinted into the user’s memory. The test then starts to show users identical pairs of images to a baseline for the exam. During this period of time, the web camera really calibrates to the user’s particular eye movement. Users who take the test are first shown a blue dot that travels around the screen. Patients can take the test in-person with the doctor or remotely, but Kaplan explained that Neurotrack is also working with pharmaceutical and biotech companies, which are interested in using the product to determine whether certain people are right for clinical trials for Alzheimer’s drugs. Now we can do all of our eye tracking through the web camera.” In the first nine months or so, we were able to reduce the time of the test from 30 minutes to five minutes and get rid of the need for the eye tracking device. “When we first licensed it from Emory it was a 30-minute long test, it required an $85,000, very expensive, very sophisticated piece of eye tracking hardware. “After we raised capital, we spent a considerable amount of time really improving and enhancing the technology,” Kaplan said. About a year later, Neurotrack raised a seed round. Kaplan met Zola and the other researchers around that time, and in May 2012, they formed Neurotrack, joined Rock Health’s accelerator, and licensed the technology from Emory. The research culminated in a five-year longitudinal study that was done at Emory Alzheimer's Disease Research Center. Zola spent almost a year researching this in nonhuman primates. One of the company’s scientific founders Stuart Zola, made an early discovery in Alzheimer’s - that the disease begins in the hippocampus, a part of the brain. The research behind the technology began in a lab at UCSD, Neurotrack Cofounder and CEO Elli Kaplan told MobiHealthNews. The first is a five minute, web-based test, called Imprint Cognitive Assessment Test that evaluates whether a patient is at risk for Alzheimer’s.
This brings Neurotrack’s total funding to $9.5 million. Palo Alto-based Neurotrack, which has developed an online cognitive assessment test, raised $6.5 million in a round led by Khosla Ventures with participation from Social Capital, Founders Fund, AME Cloud Ventures, and iSeed Ventures.
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