Winterlight teams with Dutch center to develop early Alzheimer’s speech biomarkers

‘Digital biomarker’ firm Winterlight Labs has partnered with a leading Alzheimer’s clinic to develop a remote measurement toolkit for tracking cognitive health.

The collaboration, with the Alzheimer Center Amsterdam of Amsterdam UMC in the Netherlands, aims to provide drug sponsors and CROs with clinical endpoints able to capture the fine-grained patterns of decline.

The project will be based on Winterlight’s machine learning-based technology, which analyses short snippets of speech to detect the extent of cognitive impairment associated with preclinical Alzheimer’s disease.

The platform will take recordings collected from patients through their own devices and analyze speech and language patterns via hundreds of vocal biomarkers.

The toolbox will be evaluated in a cohort study, with the aim being to detect trends and patterns associated with Alzheimer’s disease. The results will be compared with traditional clinical assessments and tracking change over longitudinal testing.

Partnership

Partnering with the Dutch Ministry of Health-funded Alzheimer’s centre will increase access to patients and help validate the approach according to Robin, Director, Clinical Research at Winterlight.

“We are delighted to collaborate with the team at Alzheimer Center Amsterdam to establish an approach that will provide remote means of detecting and assessing the impact of preclinical Alzheimer’s.

“The study will validate the use of speech measures by comparing to traditional clinical assessments and tracking change over longitudinal testing. A roadmap will then be developed to implement the toolbox in clinical trials.”

Data

The partnership follows just weeks after Winterlight published data from a collaboration with Genentech that found associations between speech characteristics and cerebral tau accumulation.

The data - which is from Genentech’s Tauriel trial of semorinemab in people with prodromal to mild Alzheimer’s - showed that at baseline, those with higher levels of tau in the brain had differences in speech, including higher use of filled pauses and simpler vocabularies.

In addition, there was an association between higher use of filled pauses at baseline and greater accumulation of tau over the 18-month study.

At the time Winterlight said “These results could mean that increased Alzheimer’s-related pathology in the brain leads to changes in how individuals speak and the words they use and adds to the evidence that Alzheimer’s disease results in measurable changes to speech patterns.”

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