Cambridge, UK—10 July 2024: Cambridge Cognition, a leading provider of digital health solutions for brain health assessments has been included in the Bio-Hermes 2 project for its voice and touch-screen cognitive assessments, funded by the UK’s innovation agency, Innovate UK.
The Bio-Hermes 2 trial, led by the Global Alzheimer’s Platform Foundation (GAP), aims to determine how accurately digital and blood-based biomarkers, individually and in combination, can predict Alzheimer’s disease diagnosed definitively with positron emission tomography (PET) brain scans and clinical assessments. The upcoming trial will involve 1,000 participants over 24 months.
Cambridge Cognition will collect speech biomarkers through its voice picture description tasks and conduct three touchscreen tasks that assess cognitive functions, such as working memory, episodic memory, and processing speed, which are commonly affected by Alzheimer’s disease. The company will use its proprietary platform, CANTAB™, to capture the digital biomarker data in clinical settings. Tests on this platform have consistently demonstrated sensitivity to cognitive performance, distinguishing between different clinical populations (Alzheimer’s Disease (AD), Mild Cognitive Impairment (MID) and healthy controls), detecting changes due to drug interventions, and identifying subtle declines associated with normal ageing.
Cambridge Cognition’s unique contribution to the Bio-Hermes 2 project lies in the combined use of voice and touchscreen tests. This method delivers gold-standard, multimodal brain health assessments sensitive to the earliest signs of neurodegeneration. Cambridge Cognition’s voice technology will provide open-ended language assessments supported by a machine-learning analytics pipeline that generates over 700 syntactic, acoustic, and semantic markers. This advanced classification model has proven effective in detecting Alzheimer’s disease.
“The Bio-Hermes 2 project will leverage our expertise in digital biomarker data capture and machine learning analytics to compare digital technologies with PET scans for diagnosing Alzheimer’s disease,” said Matthew Stork, CEO of Cambridge Cognition. “This grant will enable us to further demonstrate the potential to combine our voice and touchscreen assessments and provide more accessible, objective and non-invasive tools for brain health assessment.”
About Cambridge Cognition
Cambridge Cognition is a technology company developing digital health products to better understand, detect and treat conditions affecting brain health. The Company’s software products assess cognitive health in patients worldwide to improve clinical trial outcomes, identify and stratify patients early and improve global efficiency in the pharmaceutical and healthcare industries.
For more about Cambridge Cognition’s digital health solutions, visit www.cambridgecognition.com