Improving outcomes for neurology clinical trials

Vesna Prčkovska, PhD

CEO, QMENTA

Clinical trials in neurological diseases are a complex area of research where figures suggest there is an unusually high failure rate.

Data from the United States shows that only 5.9% of phase I neurology clinical trial drugs are likely to get FDA approval and of the 2,352 neurology clinical trials started in 2020, fewer than 700 are still active.

Globally, a billion people suffer neurological conditions such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, multiple sclerosis, stroke, epilepsy, brain injury, brain cancer and other neurodegenerative diseases and with an aging population, that is set to increase.

Addressing the failure rate 

Dr Vesna Prčkovska, CEO of QMENTA, believes that failure rate urgently needs addressing if patients are to benefit from new treatments.

“There are many factors that make neurology clinical trials hard to execute. They are multi-centre, often global trials that depend on advanced imaging techniques that generate large, complex image files that are hard to manage.”

“Additionally, clinicians examining the images for disease progression are often forced to make subjective judgments on what they are seeing. All this introduces a lot of unwanted variation, costs and delays that lead to patient drop out and uncertain outcomes.”

Dr Prčkovska and her partners founded QMENTA eight years ago to address the pain points faced by research groups, biopharma and the CROs (contract research organisations) running these trials.

“We provide AI-powered cloud solutions to improve outcomes of brain research and clinical trials.”

Helping to improve outcomes  

QMENTA’s AI-powered cloud neuroimaging software facilitates the entire clinical trial process. The platform simplifies data aggregation and collaboration, automates quality checks and patient de-identification, enables tailored workflows, consistent application of advanced AI biomarker analysis, remote reading and detailed reporting. It all leads to more efficient and predictable study execution.

Dr Prčkovska says: “Particularly in neurology, access to high quality information, simplification of data management and enabling consistent biomarker analyses leads to better outcomes in clinical trials. We are here to empower the research and therapy development that one day, we hope, will make brain diseases a thing of the past”.