In Search of Prognosis Tools

IXICO plc, a brain health company has been awarded a Stratified Medicine Grant by the Technology Strategy Board (TSB) to support the development of products addressing the global dementia challenge. The grant was awarded under the TSB’s recently launched ‘Advancing In-Vivo Imaging for Stratified Medicine’ competition. 

For this project, a consortium led by IXICO, which includes Imperial College London, Medimmune  Ltd and a second leading global pharmaceutical company as commercial partners, will apply a machine learning framework to a unique combination of reference data to develop a digital dementia prognosis tool.  This will use commonly collected diagnostic information (including MRI scans and cognitive, functional and demographic data) to stratify patients based on their expected rate of decline.  This could help with the diagnosis of dementia in the clinic and also with the enrichment of patient populations enrolled in clinical trials of investigational drugs, potentially improving the likelihood of measuring a therapeutic effect.

Several further global pharmaceutical companies have expressed interest joining the project as collaborators, and contributing clinical trial data in due course.  The total value of the 24 month research project is approximately £1 million.  The value of the grant is £633,962 of which £456,956 is allocated to IXICO and the remainder to Imperial College.  The pharmaceutical partners and collaborators are contributing scientific resources from their R&D teams and access to data from completed clinical trials.

This brings the total grant funding secured by IXICO in the last 18 months to approximately £2.6 million of which approximately £2.4 million remains to be drawn down by IXICO.