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Aspect Medical Systems is looking into innovative ways to apply the significant advances it has made in its EEG-based (electroencephalogram) brain monitoring technology. The company founded a new Neuroscience Division in 2001 to leverage the company's expertise in brain monitoring to help improve patient care for people suffering from neurologically-based diseases. Aspect is conducting research to investigate the benefits of EEG-based brain monitoring to help diagnose and treat dementia caused by Alzheimer's disease and to treat depression. While depth of consciousness monitoring remains the main focus of Aspect's business, development of novel, easy-to-use clinical devices in the neurological arena is a natural extension of the company's mission and technological expertise. Management of Antidepressant TherapyMore than 18 million adults in the United States suffer from a depressive illness, and while several classes and many different medications are available, any one first-line medication has proven to be less than 50 percent effective. A patient's response to antidepressants occurs over a period of weeks to months, and multiple medication trials are required for most patients. In an attempt to shorten the time period it takes for depressed patients to find relief, Aspect is conducting a study at Massachusetts General Hospital to evaluate the use of its brain monitoring technology to predict the effectiveness of antidepressant medications in treating depressed patients. An interim analysis of this study presented at the New Clinical Drug Evaluation Unit meeting in June 2004 showed that Aspect's technology was able to predict treatment response with 83 percent accuracy. The trial will ultimately enroll 100 patients and is expected to be complete at the end of 2004. "This study marks the first prospective evaluation of Aspect's frontal EEG technology to predict antidepressant treatment response," said Philip Devlin, General Manager of Aspect's Neuroscience Division. "These results further validate that it may be possible to develop an easy-to-use clinical assessment tool that predicts drug efficacy and enables clinicians to improve the management of antidepressant therapy. We look forward to further exploring this possibility as we complete this study in the coming months." Aspect's study follows similar research conducted by renowned scientists Dr. Ian Cook and Dr. Andrew Leuchter from the Neuropsychiatric Institute and David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. Dr. Leuchter now serves as chair of Aspect's neuroscience advisory board, and Aspect recently announced an exclusive agreement to license an EEG-based brain assessment tool developed at UCLA called Cordance. The company plans to use this partnership to evaluate the optimal combination of BIS technology and Cordance to develop new brain monitoring technologies. "Aspect has demonstrated a unique ability to translate complex data about brain activity into valuable and practical clinical tools," said Dr. Leuchter. "This technology holds promise to aid the management of psychiatric and neurodegenerative diseases in clinical practice settings and to accelerate the development of drug and device therapies." In addition to helping patients directly, Aspect's technology may also help aid the development of new treatments for depression. By identifying the trial subjects who are responsive to depression treatments, the technology could enable researchers to discover the most promising antidepressant compounds with significantly fewer experimental subjects, thereby reducing development costs and accelerating time-to-market. Currently underway at UCLA and Massachusetts General Hospital is a study funded by Eli Lilly and Company and another large pharmaceutical company to identify 'placebo responders' in depression trials using the Cordance technology.
Diagnosis and Management of Alzheimer's Disease Alzheimer's disease directly affects more than four million people in the U.S. and is the fourth-leading cause of death in the country (100,000 deaths per year). Researchers and clinicians are interested in determining ways to identify Alzheimer's disease in its early stages, to track its progression and to more effectively manage the illness. A quantitative objective biomarker of brain function could help clinicians identify the disease in its early stages and manage patients with Alzheimer's disease.This could also serve as a useful tool for pharmaceutical and medical device companies that are developing therapies for this growing patient population. Clinical studies have demonstrated that Aspect's BIS technology effectively quantifies changes in EEG and correlates with changes in cerebral metabolic activity and clinical measures of cognitive function, such as the probability of recall and memory formation. Accordingly, Aspect's brain monitoring technology holds promise to be a useful tool in detecting and monitoring the progression of Alzheimer's more accurately than social cues or the simple cognitive tests currently in use. A recent study conducted at McLean Hospital and Harvard Medical School demonstrated that Aspect's brain-monitoring technology successfully identified patients with mild Alzheimer's disease and correlated with the severity of their dementia. "Diagnosing Alzheimer's disease at its earliest stages is critical to helping provide the best care for patients suffering from this progressive disease," said Janet Lawrence, MD, lead investigator for the study at McLean Hospital and Harvard Medical School. "The results of this study demonstrate that brain monitoring -- using EEG bispectrum from a single frontotemporal channel -- may be useful in the development of a clinical index that could aid in early diagnosis of patients with mild dementia. Further research will seek to clarify whether brain monitoring could also have a role in monitoring the efficacy of Alzheimer's disease therapies."
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