ViewMind’s Headset-Driven Eye Movement Assessment Offers a Window Into Brain Health
The company’s non-invasive functional brain health meter has been shown to be highly specific and sensitive for identifying a range of neurological conditions and subtle cognitive changes.
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The Eye-Brain Connection
One of the exciting things to come out of StartUp Health’s Alzheimer’s Moonshot, which has accepted more than 30 companies since its founding last year, is an understanding of the diverse areas of innovation emerging around brain health. Within this health moonshot there are sub-communities focused on everything from stem cells to voice biomarkers to blood tests to AI chatbots.
A particularly innovative area of discovery related to brain health has to do with the eyes. Poets and philosophers have called the eyes the “windows to the soul” but they’re also a window into the brain. Eyes are literally part of the brain’s anatomy, and their movements are regulated by complex interactions among various neural circuits.
All around the world scientists are tapping into this eye-brain connection. RetiSpec is looking at retinal imaging, and companies like REGEnLIFE and Optoceutics are using light therapy to heal the brain through the eyes.
Enter ViewMind, a new addition to our Alzheimer’s Moonshot. ViewMind is commercializing decades of research that proves that by tracking eye movements we can gain a precise and accurate understanding of neurological conditions and monitor fine grain changes in cognition due to a therapeutic intervention. The approach is non-invasive, affordable, and scalable.
Origin Story
Many founders in health tech are inventors or scientists, focused on discoveries in the lab. Mark Edwards, CEO & Co-founder of ViewMind, brings ideas from the lab to the market.
“At the end of the day I’m a company builder,” says Edwards, who joined ViewMind as a co-founder in 2019. Edwards has helmed seven companies in the data, AI, and software spaces over several decades and has multiple exits, ranging from small startups to the largest subsidiary of a FTSE 100 company.
What convinced Edwards to join ViewMind was a foundational body of scientific work 23 years in the making, including 24 patents and 80 publications in medical journals. ViewMind’s core technology is the life’s work of Gerardo Fernandez, PhD, who is now one of ViewMind’s co-founders and serves as Chief Science Officer. For decades Fernandez studied the relationship between eye movement and cognition, neurodegenerative disease, and neuropsychiatric disorders. His work took him around the globe to some of the world’s leading institutions.
When Edwards was introduced to Fernandez’s work, he not only saw a commercial opportunity. He felt a moral obligation to act.
“The reason I took the helm at ViewMind is I saw a robust, differentiated, and validated technology that could solve a huge problem in brain health that millions of people could benefit from,” says Edwards. “It was exciting, of course, but I also felt a responsibility to take what I’ve learned in building four global market-leading companies and bring it to bear on ViewMind’s technology.”
Edwards started by recruiting an experienced team. He brought on Danilo Verge, MD, formally a global medical executive at AstraZeneca and Novo Nordisk, as Chief Medical Officer and COO. He tapped Abi Vase, who’s built and exited three companies in the neuro market, as Chief Commercial Officer. And he brought on Renata Alfonso, former CEO of CNN-Brazil and current chairwoman of UNICEF Brazil, to be President of LATAM operations and Chief Marketing Officer.
Under the Hood
When you enter a room, you might feel like our eyes glance around without rhyme or reason. But the way our eyes move is far from random. One of the many things that Fernandez discovered in his work was that while humans are looking at a point and absorbing and encoding information from that point, our peripheral vision is capturing data that allows the brain to analyze the entire scene to work out the next point that contains valuable information. This process creates involuntary eye movements that shift our focus, called saccades. It turns out these saccades can tell us an awful lot about our brains.
Our vision system is highly optimized for acquiring and encoding visual information. Different neuronal networks are then activated depending on which brain function needs to be engaged.
When someone has a neurological impairment, these eye movement patterns are disrupted and altered. For example, if someone has Alzheimer's disease, they will remember for a finite time what their eyes have encoded previously, resulting in having to go back periodically and retrace their steps visually. Different neurological conditions have different patterns for how they alter eye movement, creating specific phenotypes that can be used to diagnose disease and monitor fine-grain changes in cognitive function.
What ViewMind has done is take well-documented and validated neuropsychological assessments and overlay their proprietary eye tracking technology and AI assessment algorithms.
“By doing this we can take a test that had a baseline sensitivity and specificity of about 70% in symptomatic patients to something in the high 90% in both symptomatic and asymptomatic individuals,” says Edwards.
When someone takes the ViewMind test, they simply put on a headset and their eyes are exposed to a visual exercise that involves shapes and directions. There is a battery of exercises and tests that are conducted through the headset. The process takes between five and 15 minutes.
When a person has completed their assessment, the data is uploaded to the cloud and analyzed by ViewMind’s algorithm. A report is then available to the clinician to assist their diagnosis or is sent straight to an electronic health record via an API.
The ViewMind test can be conducted almost anywhere, but their go-to-market strategy targets neurology offices and also clinics focused on preventative care. They’re also working with pharmaceutical companies because the precision, accuracy, and repeatability of the test, with no learning effect, makes it a powerful tool for clinical trials, drug development, and drug commercialization.
Global Impact
What does it mean for average patients to have a non-invasive, affordable solution for assessing neurological conditions? To answer that question, Edwards recalls one particular patient story. The man was in his 60s and was believed to have dementia based on his symptoms. He was receiving treatment and nothing was helping. He was getting progressively worse. He took a ViewMind assessment and they were able to discover that he didn’t have dementia at all. He actually had severe depression. The clinician changed his treatment and in a few months he was in a much better place.
ViewMind’s discoveries would be game changing purely as a medical advancement in brain health. But their tool doesn’t just improve quality, it also increases access to care.
“Today, waiting times for neuro specialists such as a neuropsychologist are very long, and their hours-long assessments just aren’t scaleable,” says Edwards.
For Edwards and his global team, that accessibility piece is key. That’s why their tests work for everyone, regardless of language or ability to read.
With decades of research behind them, and an experienced team of operatives working on commercialization, ViewMind appears well positioned to advance the field of brain health. Join us in welcoming them to StartUp Health’s Alzheimer’s Moonshot Community.
Connect with ViewMind via email
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Published: Nov 15, 2024