Shots:
- Given the high variability and subjectivity of traditional clinical scales, there is an urgent need for objective biomarkers to assess CNS disease progression more reliably
- NeuraLight is at the forefront of precision neurology, developing objective and sensitive biomarkers that bring greater accuracy and consistency to CNS research
- In this exclusive conversation, Edmund Ben Ami, Co-Founder and CEO of NeuraLight, discusses the company’s proprietary eye movement biomarker platform, its role in accelerating CNS drug development, and key insights from clinical trial collaborations, offering a glimpse into the future of data-driven neurology
Saurabh: How does NeuraLight’s platform leverage eye movement biomarkers to accelerate CNS drug development?
Edmund: NeuraLight advances precision neurology by delivering objective and sensitive biomarkers of CNS disease progression that help pharma detect treatment effects earlier, increase statistical power, and reduce trial size and duration. These biomarkers are generated by quantifying subtle changes in eye movements, providing a validated and reproducible clinical endpoint that overcomes the limitations of current traditional clinical scales.
Saurabh: Can you elaborate on the use of computer vision and machine learning within your technology stack for oculometric analysis?
Edmund: We apply proprietary computer vision algorithms to standard video recordings, extracting oculometric features. Machine learning models translate these features into clinically validated biomarkers, correlated with established scales for CNS diseases, such as MDS-UPDRS for Parkinson’s, ALSFRS-R for ALS, and EDSS for MS. This ensures that our endpoints are reliable clinically relevant, and reproducible across multicenter trials.
Saurabh: What distinguishes NeuraLight’s platform from other clinical assessment tools currently used for CNS diseases?
Edmund: Unlike traditional clinical scales that rely on subjective ratings and are prone to high variability, NeuraLight provides objective biomarkers of CNS disease progression. Our measures are sensitive enough to capture changes even when gold-standard tools remain unchanged, offering earlier and more reliable signals of efficacy. Assessments take only minutes using a tablet and webcam, ensuring minimal patient burden, reliable deployment across diverse sites, and frictionless integration into trial workflows.
Saurabh: How was the platform validated, and what have been the most significant technical or operational challenges during development?
Edmund: The platform has been validated in longitudinal studies in Parkinson’s, ALS, and MS, consistently demonstrating strong correlations with gold-standard measures, as well as accurately detecting change over time in disease progression, involving over 1200 patients with CNS diseases. When used in different trials in different sites worldwide, our biomarkers demonstrated reproducible results across sites and study designs. In addition, we examined +3500 healthy controls, creating a large dataset to support the validation of our biomarkers.
Saurabh: NeuraLight is engaged in multiple clinical partnerships worldwide. Could you share more details about the scope and impact of these collaborations?
Edmund: We partner with pharma and biotech companies across the US and Europe, serving as an endpoint in their clinical trials. We also collaborate with leading medical centers worldwide, championed by leading neurologists. These partnerships allow us to integrate our biomarkers successfully, supporting the drug development pipelines in CNS diseases.
Saurabh: What have been some notable findings from recent partnerships, such as the correlation between oculometric measures and clinical assessment in ALS trials or applications for Multiple Sclerosis?
Edmund: Our partnerships have already demonstrated that NeuraLight’s biomarkers capture clinically meaningful changes that traditional scales often miss. In ALS, oculometric measures such as corrective saccadic latency and saccadic intrusions showed strong correlations with ALSFRS-R scores, tracking bulbar decline and disease progression with high sensitivity. In MS, our biomarkers correlated with motor and cognitive scales, highlighting their potential to detect subtle changes in both motor and cognitive domains. Finally, in Parkinson’s, multicenter studies confirmed that measures like saccadic hypometria reliably tracked progression even when traditional scores like MDS-UPDRS remained stable. Together, these findings show how our biomarkers promote trial success and provide pharma with earlier, more reliable signals of efficacy.
Saurabh: How do you see NeuraLight’s platform evolving over the next few years, and what are the next milestones in your product pipeline?
Edmund: Our near-term milestones include extending biomarker development into additional CNS indications, and integrating our platform into standard neurological assessments. Longer term, we aim to set a new standard for precision biomarkers in CNS trials worldwide.
Saurabh: Are there any upcoming clinical trials, partnerships, or technical innovations that you can share details about?
Edmund: We plan to have a large multicenter trial with a pharma company, serving as an endpoint in more than 20 sites worldwide. We also hope to serve as an essential endpoint in a platform trial, where several pharma companies share the same protocol in many sites, thus enabling our biomarker to support multiple trials at the same time period with specific drugs.
About the Author:
Edmund Ben Ami
Edmund is a seasoned entrepreneur and award-winning mathematician with over 20 years of experience advancing technologies that bridge mathematics, software engineering, and medicine. He has led the development of innovative methods in computer vision and signal processing, applying them to some of the most pressing challenges in healthcare. By building and guiding world-class teams, he has helped translate complex computational advances into tools with real impact on patient care and medical research
