Stimulating Neural Activity to Improve Blood Flow and Reduce Amyloid: path to Clinical Trials

Alzheimer's Disease (AD) is a looming epidemic, with an urgent need for new therapies to delay or prevent symptom onset and progression. There is growing awareness that clinical trials must target stage‐appropriate pathophysiological mechanisms to effectively develop disease‐modifying treatments. Advances in AD biomarker research have demonstrated changes in amyloid, brain metabolism, and other pathophysiologies prior to the onset of memory loss, with some markers possibly changing one or two decades earlier. The brain region responsible for spatial navigation and memories of experience, the hippocampus, is one of the areas first affected in Alzheimer's disease (AD) and other memory disorders. Prior research has shown how coordinated electrical activity across many neurons in the hippocampus represents memories of experiences and this coordinated activity fails in animal models of AD. The research also showed that stimulating neurons to produce a specific component of this activity, called gamma oscillations, reduces AD pathology. The goal of this proposal is to translate this discovery that stimulating specific patterns of neural activity is neuroprotective from rodents to humans using a non‐invasive approach. This research includes preclinical testing that will be used to design and justify a multi‐site clinical trial to test this approach as a treatment for AD, for which there are currently no effective therapies. Cognito Therapeutics has licensed the technology from prior animal research to transition this work to humans. The company will provide the Flicker devices for conducting this study. The device is similar to sunglasses and is both comfortable and easy to use. Ten participants with mild cognitive impairment will be randomly assigned to two study arms. Although all participants will receive Flicker exposure, half of the participants will receive the exposure during the entire intervention period (8 weeks of Flicker) while the other half of the participants will receive Flicker exposure only during the second half of the intervention period (for 4 weeks of active treatment). During the course of the study, participants will undergo venous blood draws and lumbar puncture for biomarker analyses at baseline, midpoint and at the end of the intervention.