Digital biomarker company Medical Care Corporation (MCC) said on Tuesday that it has achieved a milestone in its history following the successful Phase I study of the digital cognitive biomarkers of storage, encoding, and retrieval for detecting Alzheimer's disease in cognitively normal adults.

Under the USD1.2m Fast Track Small Business Innovation Research grant awarded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the company's study is led by principle investigator Dr William Shankle, MD, MS, MCC's CMO, along with co-investigators Dr Ronald Petersen, MD, PhD, director of the Mayo Clinic Alzheimer's Disease Research Center and Dr Junko Hara, PhD, MCC's CSO.

According to the company, the digital biomarkers uses a hierarchical Bayesian analysis of responses to a simple list-learning task. The model assesses each subject's distinct abilities to store and retrieve information across various stages of transient and durable learning. The digital biomarkers of storage, encoding, and retrieval, reflect early cognitive changes that precede the symptomatic stages of Alzheimer's disease.

The study analyzed data drawn from the Mayo Clinic Study of Aging , which is an initiative that longitudinally assessed cognitive function in a cohort of aging adults who were cognitively normal at their first assessment. Those who maintained normal cognitive function were grouped as Stable and those who later developed memory impairments due to Alzheimer's disease were grouped as Progressor.

Based on data of each subject's first assessment, the company's digital cognitive biomarkers detected significant, yet outwardly undetectable, differences between the Progressor group and the Stable group as well as identify early, pre-symptomatic stages of Alzheimer's disease.