Technology Marriage Promises to Advance Aspect’s Neuroscience Initiative

This summer, building upon nearly two years of collaboration with Dr. Andrew Leuchter, professor of psychiatry at the Neuropsychiatric Institute of UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine, Aspect finalized an agreement to explore how a combination of Aspect’s brain monitoring technology, and a brain monitoring technology developed by Dr. Leuchter and researchers at UCLA, could lead to improved drug and device therapies for the central nervous system. The initial therapeutic area for the technology is the treatment of depression.

This effort is part of Aspect’s Neuroscience Initiative, a series of investigations by Aspect to explore the application of brain monitoring in the diagnosis, management and treatment of a variety of brain and neurological disorders such as Alzheimer’s Disease, depression and dementia. Dr. Leuchter was also named to serve as Chair of Aspect’s Neuroscience Advisory Board which guides the Initiative.

The marriage of the UCLA technology and Aspect’s brain monitoring technology holds promise to lead to development of a practical clinical tool that will aid in the development of new treatments for depression, and in selecting the most effective anti-depressant treatments for individual patients.

Currently, it often takes weeks, or months, for commonly prescribed anti-depressant medications to take effect, during which time the patient may suffer the side effects of the drugs without experiencing the benefits. It is not uncommon for patients to wait weeks only to learn that they aren’t responding to the prescribed medication as hoped, and to then repeat the process with a different drug, or to abandon treatment altogether.

The UCLA technology, like BIS, is based on EEG analysis. It has shown promise in differentiating patients likely to benefit from anti-depressive drug therapy and those who are not. It has also shown promise in predicting, within days of the onset of treatment, which patients will likely experience eventual relief from depression using a particular drug therapy. This has important implications for the research and development of effective anti-depressant compounds, and for clinical psychiatric practice.*

For pharmaceutical and device companies as well as researchers, this new advance could mean faster, more efficient development of depression drugs. For patients, it could eventually mean the end of lengthy hit-or-miss efforts to find an effective pharmacological treatment for depression.

“Dr. Leuchter’s innovative research and Aspect’s experience in the development of brain monitoring technology for the medical marketplace are highly complementary,” said Nassib Chamoun, president and CEO of Aspect. “The merger of the two is a major step forward in the development of practical, clinical tools for use in the diagnosis and effective treatment of neurological diseases, including depression.”

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