Funding for Digital Platform to Support CNS Diagnosis

Brain Health company IXICO plc has received an Innovate UK grant funded project to support further development of its Assessa® medical device technology. 

The project will develop digital technologies to quantify vascular disease burden in patients with CNS diseases with the outcome to enable the design and execution of better targeted clinical trials.  Brain scan and clinical data from patients with vascular disease will be tested for different algorithms that automatically quantify a subject's vascular disease burden against current visual assessments.  The developed vascular disease biomarkers will be incorporated into the Assessa® platform providing clinicians with information that is clinically actionable and easy to interpret.

As the lead partner, IXICO will be working alongside Imperial College London and Edinburgh University in the project which is part-funded by Innovate UK (formerly the Technology Strategy Board), the UK’s innovation agency.  The project is expected to run for two years with a total investment of just over £1 million.

Professor Derek Hill, Chief Executive of IXICO, commented:

“In current clinical practice, around one in five dementia patients suffering from vascular disease initially receive a misdiagnosis of Alzheimer's disease, resulting in potential mistreatment and excess costs.  The selection of IXICO by Innovate UK as the lead partner for this project not only validates our market-leading digital dementia diagnosis platform, but also demonstrates the increasing demand for digital technology to support traditional diagnoses.  We believe that the use of stratification tools to provide a more personalized diagnosis of patients with vascular causes of dementia should improve patient outcomes and reduce the cost burden.”