TORONTO, December 4, 2019
Today at the 12th Clinical Trials for Alzheimer’s Disease (CTAD) Conference, Winterlight presented a pair of posters detailing recent advances in their speech-based digital biomarker.
Using data from an ongoing prospective study of patients with Frontotemporal Lobar Degeneration (FTLD), the team presented proof-of-concept data showing that analysis of simple speech tasks can be used to generate a Language Composite Score that may be more sensitive to disease progression than existing assessments.
Concurrently, the team also presented an update to an ongoing normative data collection study. They showed that two components of speech previously related to Alzheimer’s Disease (coherence and information units) declined in Healthy Adults over a 6 month period, with no accompanying change in the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA).
Together these results provide preliminary support for the use of speech-based digital biomarkers as sensitive tools for detecting subtle changes in cognition within clinical trials and follow up work is ongoing.
Winterlight Labs is commercializing a proprietary language-based diagnostic system that analyzes natural speech to detect and monitor dementia, Alzheimer’s, aphasia, and various other cognitive conditions. Winterlight's scalable platform uses short recorded speech samples to analyze hundreds of linguistic cues, and can detect dementia and other conditions with a high level of accuracy. This is a major improvement over current pencil-and-paper tests which are time-consuming, costly, and difficult to administer. The platform has applications in drug trials, long-term and primary care, and speech-language pathology.
Since its founding, Winterlight Labs has seen strong interest from pharmaceutical companies and other potential partners who view the technology as a major improvement over current methods of detection or screening. The company has gained support from the pan-Canadian AGE-WELL Network of Centres of Excellence (NCE), the Ontario Brain Institute, Ontario Centres of Excellence, and the University of Toronto Banting and Best Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship. For more information, visit www.winterlightlabs.com.
Media Inquiries:
Winterlight Labs
Liam Kaufman, CEO
liam [at] winterlightlabs.com