Embic’s Advanced Analytics Accelerate Alzheimer’s Research
Company Quantifies Cognitive Processes and Shares Data with Global Research Community through the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI)
Newport Beach, December 18, 2023
Embic Corporation is committed to the global effort of understanding and effectively treating Alzheimer’s disease (AD), and is sharing its advanced analytic outcomes with the research community through the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI). Qualified researchers can access to the full ADNI dataset, which now includes Embic’s quantitative measures of latent cognitive processes.
Through an ongoing partnership with ADNI, Embic previously generated a unique set of parameters that objectively represent latent cognitive processes of information encoding and retrieval. These “quantified cognitive processes” (qCPs) underpin memory and verbal fluency, making them insightful markers of overall brain health. A revised set of qCPs adjust for the effects of three different wordlists used across different ADNI study phases, and also for the effect of the shuffled presentation order used in the ADAS-Cog wordlist memory test. These refinements remove potential confounds in the data and allow researchers to compare longitudinal results across different ADNI cohorts.
“Sharing this new qCP data demonstrates Embic’s support and commitment to an important global research effort. As new disease modifying therapies for Alzheimer’s disease progress to market, pragmatic tools that enable timely intervention will be paramount to clinical success. New insights, like those captured by Embic’s qCPs, reflect pre-symptomatic changes in cognition and facilitate understanding of very early AD, accelerate trial enrollment, improve outcome measures, and enable earlier intervention for patients with emerging AD pathology” said Junko Hara, Ph.D., Embic’s chief scientific officer.
Dr. Michael Weiner, Professor Emeritus of Radiology and Biomedical Imaging, Medicine, Psychiatry, and Neurology at the University of California, San Francisco, and the Principal Investigator of ADNI, commented, “Over the course of ADNI’s 20-year history, the program has accumulated a valuable dataset through the generous involvement of several thousand research subjects, and through collaboration with leading AD researchers and institutes. We are very pleased to see efforts like Embic’s that leverage our dataset and bring valuable new insights to the research community.”
About ADNI: ADNI is a global research study that actively supports the investigation and development of treatments that slow or stop the progression of Alzheimer’s disease (AD). In this multisite longitudinal study, researchers at 63 sites in the US and Canada track the progression of AD in the human brain with clinical, imaging, genetic and biospecimen biomarkers through the process of normal aging, early mild cognitive impairment (EMCI), and late mild cognitive impairment (LMCI) to dementia or AD. The overall goal of ADNI is to validate biomarkers for use in Alzheimer’s disease clinical treatment trials.
About Embic Corporation: Embic Corporation (www.embic.us) is a data analytics company that develops mathematical models for characterizing human cognition and brain health. The company’s cognitive assessment products are used in primary and specialty care settings to evaluate memory concerns and in clinical research settings to enroll studies and to measure treatment effects.