The eye as a window to the brain

Project Information

NeuroRetina

Grant agreement ID: 101072301

DOI

10.3030/101072301

Project closed

EC signature date 24 May 2022

Start date 1 June 2022

End date 30 November 2022

Funded under

• European innovation ecosystems

Total cost

No data

EU contribution

€ 75 000,00

Coordinated by

NOCTURNE GMBH
Germany

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - NeuroRetina (The eye as a window to the brain)

Reporting period: 2022-06-01 to 2022-11-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Neurological diseases are the main cause of healthy years lost due to disability and the number of patients continues to increase with population growth and aging. Currently, there are more than 61 million people suffering from Alzheimer's disease (AD), Parkinson's disease (PD), and multiple sclerosis (MS). Healthcare costs are estimated to rise from 985 billion per year to 2.4 trillion in 2030, in EU and US alone. Most of these costs are driven by the loss of productivity (early retirement) of patients, but also the hours spent by their families as caregivers.
Currently, still, a large number of these patients are being misdiagnosed, the process of diagnosis takes up to several years and involves tests and imaging techniques, like MRI, that are expensive and not always widely available. There is an urgent need for faster, more accessible, and more personalized treatment.
Our end goal is, to use the eye as a window to the brain to offer a screening that detects changes in the retina at the earliest stage of the disease, and by enabling monitoring at more frequent time points for a more personalized therapy decision, to delay disability and prologue the healthy stage for the patient.
We address this by leveraging the retina as an excellent “gate” to look into the brain, and an already established on-the-market hardware technology the optical coherence tomography (OCT) device, that captures retinal images, but is limited to neurological applications.
Nocturne provides the right software specifically for these applications. Its patented and CE-certified AI-powered application incorporates more than 8 years of expertise in OCT image analysis for various clinical applications and covers the entire analysis pipeline from ensuring the adequate quality of data to various innovative imaging biomarker extraction to tracking changes over time.
With its product, Nocturne addresses customers in pharmaceutical research, academia, and clinical care.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

Our focus is by removing the technical barriers and by providing unique insights into the diseases to enable better disease management and patient care. Nocturne’s strategy is built upon sustainable advantages from a superior AI-based software technology validated on more than 40.000 OCT retinal images from relevant diseases with unique insights into the neurological field based on strong research, published results, and developed with leading neurologists and international centers.
First studies for MS, and related diseases like Neuromyelitis optica spectrum disorders (NMOSD), acute optic neuritis (ON), and Idiopathic intracranial hypertension (IIH) have been published and show that Nocturne parameters can be used at the time point of the diagnosis and for monitoring purposes for further therapy decisions. Additionally, Nocturne is collaborating with UCLA, Glaucoma advanced image laboratory to develop a pipeline for identifying early patients with glaucoma that will have a more aggressive disease course. We see the potential to provide a similar value for PD, AD, and mild cognitive impairment (MCI).
Nocturne’s local installable application is already used in 5 major university hospitals in Germany, and as a research tool in 2 US centers, 1 in Canada and has a collaboration agreement with one international clinical research organization (CRO) for pharmaceutical drug studies from Switzerland.
During this European program, Nocturne’s goal was to increase the scalability of its product by creating also a cloud version of the application. This not only reduces the effort in the deployment and customer support activities but increases the attractiveness of its application as it facilitates the integration into further platforms for example in the collaboration with CROs, pharmaceutical companies, or hardware manufacturers, as well as in the potential of addressing other segments like telemedicine.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

Personalized treatment leads to care with better outcomes, care that is more efficient and sustainable. The next step that Nocturne is set to achieve is scaling its pipeline to help millions of patients by addressing the possibility of screening for early signs of neurological diseases, especially in the case of MCI and AD.
With additional funding that Nocturne is planning to acquire in 2023 further developments will include expanding internationally, conducting with its international collaborating hospital partners studies to improve its current anomaly detection and screening pipeline, and establishing the further use case of screening and prevention.
The current pandemic has not only placed a new focus on prevention, but also on new healthcare pathways, like virtual care and hospitals without walls, that focus on a patient-centric approach, and as such open up new possibilities to provide a higher quality of care, that is available everywhere, even at home and/or in rural areas or regions less connected to specialists.
Nocturne identified this opportunity to play an important role in these new forms of providing healthcare, as its product, especially now with the cloud version, can be used to provide assessments at designated points of care, like for example pharmacies, outside the hospital, and connect its provided report with more specialized physicians, if necessary.

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