ARTICLE SUMMARY:
Sinaptica began its commercial journey only recently, although its deep scientific underpinnings have already gotten it through a positive Phase II trial, which dramatically showed the benefit of a noninvasive neuromodulation therapy designed to achieve a network effect that slows disease progression in patients with mild to moderate Alzheimer’s.
The pathophysiology of Alzheimer’s disease is not well understood; and that’s perhaps why more than 200 drugs under investigation for this degenerative brain condition have failed in the last decade. Plaques made of amyloid-beta and tangles of insoluble tau proteins are two physical manifestations of the disease, but it’s not known whether they’re at the root of the disease, or covariants with some other disease-causing factors.
The founders of Sinaptica Therapeutics thus decided to take a very different approach to Alzheimer’s by identifying the electrical network that’s faulty in AD patients, whether that dysfunction starts with amyloid plaques and tau tangles or not, and then noninvasively stimulating it back into harmony. That’s a simplistic explanation of the company’s therapy, which so far appears to work, at least according to a 50-patient Phase II trial published in Brain in November 2022.
