NeuraLight Reveals the World-Class Scientific Leaders Helping to Advance Its Transformation of Disease Progression Measurement in Neurology

Precision biomarker company’s Scientific Advisory Board includes multiple Nobel Prize winners and the creators of current gold standard in Parkinson’s disease progression

The original version of this press release is available on Business Wire

Tel Aviv, Israel – NeuraLight, NeuraLight, the leader in developing precision biomarkers for neurological disease, today announced significant developments to its scientific leadership.

Prof. Thomas Südhof, a Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist and one of the world’s leading Alzheimer’s disease researchers, has elevated his previous advisory position to the role of Scientific Co-founder and joined the newly constituted Scientific Advisory Board.

This follows the announcement that world-recognized neurologist Prof. Olivier Rascol, a co-creator of the current gold standard for measuring Parkinson’s disease progression (MDS-UPDRS), will head the board.

The unparalleled collective clinical expertise of the board will strengthen NeuraLight’s validation-first strategy, which has already produced movement-based progression measures with 10x more sensitivity than MDS-UPDRS. The full board is composed of:

• Prof. Thomas Südhof was a 2013 Nobel laureate for his work on the mechanism of synaptic transmission. He currently heads the Südhof Lab at Stanford University. Formerly a key scientific advisor to the company, Prof. Südhof has now deepened his commitment by formally stepping into the role of Scientific Co-founder. In this expanded capacity, he oversees the scientific foundations of the company’s biomarkers and supports the continued advancement of their work in Alzheimer’s disease and other neurological indications.
• Prof. Olivier Rascol brings more than 30 years of leadership in Parkinson’s disease clinical research and deep expertise in motor progression, disease modification and clinical trial design. His work has helped shape how progression is measured and how treatments are evaluated in neurodegenerative diseases. A professor of clinical pharmacology at Toulouse University Hospital, he led promising recent research on the use of GLP-1 to treat Parkinson’s disease. At NeuraLight, Prof. Rascol will guide scientific strategy and help expand the clinical utility of the platform as it continues scaling its precision biomarkers across therapeutic areas.
• Prof. Alvin Roth has worked widely on market design, including in health care, for which he won the 2012 Nobel Prize in Economics. He is a professor of economics at Stanford University. He is supporting NeuraLight with market design, helps structure value-based partnerships with healthcare stakeholders and advises on overall ecosystem strategy.

“We are thrilled and honored to welcome some of the world’s most recognized and impactful scientists to the board. They will be invaluable in advancing NeuraLight’s clinical validation strategy and pharmaceutical partnerships,” said Edmund Ben-Ami, NeuraLight’s CEO and co-founder. “We see this as further confirmation that our platform can truly transform the way disease progression is measured.”

NeuraLight harnessed a century’s worth of research on the brain-eye movement connection to build a 10-minute assessment, conducted on a standard tablet, that delivers biomarkers with the ability to detect disease changes that traditional methods cannot. The platform is currently deployed in clinical partnerships across the globe, spanning over 1,200 patients with Parkinson’s, ALS, MS and Huntington’s disease, as well as in multiple commercial pharmaceutical trials.

“I have been impressed by the quality of NeuraLight’s validation data,” said Prof. Rascol. “Clinical scales are useful but often noisy, and imaging is costly and complex. That’s why I’m excited by NeuraLight’s eye-movement biomarkers; they provide objective, quantitative measures of disease severity and can detect subtle changes in disease progression missed by traditional clinical assessments.”

Working closely with the board to support NeuraLight’s clinical strategy are several key scientific advisors:

• Prof. Cristina Sampaio, Chief Medical Officer for the CDHI Foundation (Cure Huntington’s Disease Initiative Foundation), is one of the foremost experts on movement disorders and clinical pharmacology. She is a Professor of Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics at the University of Lisbon.
• Prof. Fred Lublin, a widely known authority on the treatment of MS, serves as director of the Corinne Goldsmith Dickinson Center for Multiple Sclerosis at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York.
• Prof. Chris Goetz, co-creator of the MDS-UPDRS, is a leading expert in movement disorder pharmacology and rating-scale development. He is a professor and director of the Movement Disorders Program at Rush University Medical Center.