A wearable headset and tablet games aim to speed up dementia drug trials by replacing a jumble of separate tests with a single, unified measurement platform. More than one million people in the UK are expected to have dementia by 2025, yet clinical trials for treatments are painfully slow, staggeringly expensive, and fail at an exceedingly high rate. For the thousands of patients already enrolled in trials, every delay squanders their contribution and prolongs the wait for effective therapies. BrainWaveBank’s existing platform already uses a comfortable headset and tablet-based cognitive games to extract brain-based biomarkers of neurophysiology and cognition. This project expands that system to assess a broader range of domains relevant to dementia—such as memory, attention, and executive function—all within one integrated session. If successful, the platform will cut patient burden, reduce variability across studies, and dramatically lower both timelines and costs for drug developers. Instead of juggling multiple tools that introduce inconsistencies, trial sponsors will get cleaner, faster data. The result: a clearer understanding of the disease and a quicker route to market for promising treatments.
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It is estimated that more than one million people in the UK will have dementia by 2025, with one in three born in 2015 projected to develop it in their lifetimes (ARUK, www.dementiastatistics.org). Clinical trials in this field are typically long, drug development costs are extremely high, and success rates for development of dementia treatments are exceedingly low. For many thousands of patients enrolled in ongoing or planned clinical trials, it is vital to maximise their valuable contribution alongside the efforts of drug developers by accelerating the path to treatment. BrainWaveBank's current platform is designed to provide a health technology solution to support measurement of drug mechanisms, stratification of treatment groups, and early detection of response to therapies. It consists of an easy-to-use, wearable headset, accompanied by games presented on a tablet that test different aspects of cognition, yielding brain-based biomarkers of neurophysiological mechanisms and cognitive function. In this project, BrainWaveBank will build upon their existing platform to incorporate integrated, synchronous assessment of a broader range of domains that are particularly relevant in dementia. Providing a single platform to unify measurements for clinical trials, where previously multiple different tools would have been used to cover the same ground, will significantly reduce patient burden, minimise variability across studies and dramatically reduce timelines and cost for drug developers, ultimately leading to a better understanding of disease and faster routes to market for promising treatments.
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