I-Corps: diagnostic & patient management tool for physicians treating movement disorders

Duke University, Durham NC

Investigators

Abstract

The broader impact/commercial potential of this I-Corps project is to accelerate the drug development process for neuropsychiatric compounds and improve the clinical management of brain disorders. This project will evaluate whether advances in deep learning-based pose tracking algorithms can lead to new business opportunities within both biotech/pharma and healthcare. Behavior is a result of the complex coordination of brain processes and is affected by disease or impairment. The behavioral repertoire of a patient or animal is a rich noninvasive source of data about its neuropsychiatric health, but limited tools exist to mine this type of data. Solving the problem of behavioral quantification has the potential to make neuropsychiatric drug development more efficient by providing biotech/pharma with a better understanding of how their drugs are working from the time they are first tested in animals all the way through pivotal human studies. Behavioral quantification tools can also assist clinicians with the treatment of neuropsychiatric diseases, which due to their complexity typically require extensive training to properly diagnose and manage. This I-Corps project is based on the development of a deep learning based behavioral quantification tool for use in drug development and clinical medicine. Current approaches to measure the efficacy of neuropsychiatric interventions are limited by their sensitivity, efficiency, and reproducibility. Breakthroughs in neuroscience have elucidated new mechanisms for drug developers to target, but limited techniques exist to evaluate the efficacy of new treatments. In addition, animal models for neuropsychiatric testing have limited translatability to clinical results, making asset prioritization difficult for drug developers. Deep learning based behavioral measurement tools serve as a noninvasive solution to this problem by automating behavioral analysis with high sensitivity and specificity. These tools can extract insights that are currently inaccessible to drug developers, which will not only lead to advances in the understanding of the biology of disease, but also the collection of pivotal data for drug approval. The ability of biotech/pharma to robustly characterize therapeutic efficacy across all stages of development reduces the regulatory and commercial risks currently associated with neuropsychiatric drug development. Similarly, physicians would be able to use advanced behavioral quantification techniques to compare a patient’s symptoms against a library of “digital fingerprints” to accurately diagnose conditions and manage symptoms. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.