The pharmaceutical industry faces a major challenge which has limited the ability to develop effective new drugs for CNS disorders. A session at the Dementia Discovery Fund’s (DDF) Annual Forum, led by Hugh Marston of Boehringer Ingelheim and Ruth McKernan of the Dementia Discovery Fund (Founder and Chair of Cumulus Neuroscience), pointed to a specific gap in current capabilities that is limiting the development of new therapies: a need for frequent measures - captured at home - to fully understand the trajectory of disease and to see if a drug works.
Over the course of a year, a panel of scientists from global pharma convened by DDF worked to define the optimal suite of tools that could measure both progression of disease in patients and outcomes in clinical trials. The pharma panel identified 6 critical requirements for an integrated platform, with a focus on the ability to record EEG at home to generate real-world data.
In parallel, BrainWaveBank Ltd. was developing a suite of tools to objectively measure memory and other core brain functions, addressing 3 of the 6 requirements identified by the pharma panel. This platform included EEG that was purpose built to be used at home, the ability to record brain activity precisely synchronised to a set of bespoke tablet-based functional assessments, and a scalable AI-driven analytics platform.
With funding provided by DDF and LifeArc, Cumulus Neuroscience was formed in 2020 by combining the BrainWaveBank
suite of tools with third-party gold standard assessments to create a single, unified platform that addressed
all 6 pharma panel requirements. This investment also enabled technical feasibility studies to validate the
platform which were executed in collaboration with the scientists from ten top pharma companies which comprise
the Cumulus Pharma Advisory Group (CPAG).