Eye-movement biomarkers may flag Parkinson’s decline earlier
Company data link subtle eye changes to later declines in daily functioning
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- Eye-movement biomarkers may flag functional decline before standard assessments.
- Parkinson's can cause slower, less accurate eye movements as the disease progresses.
- Eye tracking may offer a sensitive way to monitor progression and treatment effects.
Neuralight’s eye-movement biomarkers may predict declines in daily functioning in people with Parkinson’s disease before those changes can be detected by conventional clinical assessments, new clinical study data suggest.
The PALOMA study (NCT05862649), which involved hundreds of adults at clinical sites in the U.S. and Europe, previously produced data that Neuralight said showed the biomarkers were more sensitive than the Movement Disorder Society-Sponsored Revision of the Unified Parkinson’s Disease Rating Scale (MDS-UPDRS), a standardized clinical scale used to assess Parkinson’s symptoms and daily functioning.
The latest data extend those findings, with the company reporting that the eye-movement biomarkers can predict deterioration before it becomes apparent on conventional clinical assessments such as the MDS-UPDRS.
Eye tracking may better detect Parkinson’s progression
These biomarkers could help researchers assess treatment responses, monitor changes in disease over time, and evaluate strategies aimed at slowing disease progression.
“Neurology has needed a way to quantify how the brain changes over time, and to connect that change to what matters most: how a patient feels and functions day to day. These results provide evidence that this can now be done, and more sensitively than the gold-standard scale allows,” Edmund Ben-Ami, Neuralight’s co-founder and CEO, said in a company press release.
“This is another exciting milestone in our mission to make brain function measurable, for both the field and the patients it serves,” Ben-Ami added.
Parkinson’s is caused by the progressive dysfunction and loss of dopaminergic neurons — nerve cells that produce dopamine, a chemical messenger important for normal signaling and movement. People with Parkinson’s can have slower and less accurate eye movements, which may become more pronounced as the disease progresses.
Tracking eye movements may, therefore, help monitor disease progression. Neuralight’s computer-based eye-tracking technology uses a standard webcam to record facial videos, with machine-learning algorithms analyzing eye movements to generate biomarkers of brain function.
The PALOMA study aimed to assess whether Neuralight’s eye-movement biomarkers could be used to track disease progression and correlate with standard clinical assessments. Earlier data reported by Neuralight indicated that its eye-movement biomarkers were about 10 times more sensitive than the MDS-UPDRS at detecting disease progression.
New data link biomarkers to earlier signs of functional decline
The company reported that its biomarkers can predict deterioration before it becomes apparent on conventional clinical assessments.
In a recently published study, researchers analyzed 280 people with Parkinson’s disease across two longitudinal trials, including PALOMA. An eye-movement biomarker detected Parkinson’s progression that was not detected by MDS-UPDRS Part 3, which assesses Parkinson’s motor symptoms.
The biomarker examined in the study, called amplitude of saccadic hypometria (ASH), which measures how accurately the eyes move toward visual targets, progressively worsened over nine months in both Parkinson’s cohorts. In the multicenter cohort, the changes were consistent across clinical sites. MDS-UPDRS Part 3 scores remained unchanged in the single-center cohort, while changes varied widely among sites in the multicenter cohort and were not statistically significant overall.
More sensitive biomarkers could be useful in clinical trials by helping researchers detect treatment effects that conventional clinical scales might miss.
The biomarkers could also have implications for clinical trial design. Neuralight noted that measures showing how neurological diseases affect patients’ daily lives are receiving increasing attention from the FDA.
Neuralight is already collaborating with companies developing potential disease-modifying therapies for Parkinson’s to incorporate its biomarkers into clinical trials. These include studies testing Teitur Trophics’ TT-P34 and Kariya Pharmaceuticals’ KP405.
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