A helmet-like medical device that emits electromagnetic waves could slow or even reverse cognitive decline in patients suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, according to a newly published study.
The company that developed the device, NeuroEM, is based in Arizona, and the study took place in Florida, but there’s a growing amount of Connecticut-based investment in the effort.
As of Oct. 2017, investors associated with the Connecticut Angel Investor Forum had seeded NeuroEM with about $150,000. As of this week, the number has since grown to more than $600,000, according to local angel investor Ed Goodwin, who said NeuroEm has raised a total of approximately $1.5 million.
NeuroEM’s eight-patient pilot study, published Tuesday by the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease, concluded that two months of transcranial electromagnetic treatment, or TEMT, was safe and improved memory performance in seven of the eight patients, who were all 63 or older with mild to moderate Alzheimer’s.
TEMT also showed “disease modifying” effects on Alzheimer’s biomarkers in patients’ blood and cerebrospinal fluid around their brains, the company said.
NeuroEM said the pilot study’s results point to “a potential breakthrough” in Alzheimer’s treatment.
While electromagnetic waves have been shown in studies to reverse Alzheimer’s in mice, questions remain whether the same will be true for humans.
More study is needed, said Ed Goodwin, a Connecticut angel investor and former Yale molecular biologist who NeuroEM appointed to its board earlier this year.
Goodwin said the pilot study’s primary focus was assessing safety and biomarkers, but he was “shocked” by the results suggesting positive cognitive results.
“If a drug company had a drug that could achieve simple [cognitive] maintenance, that would be an absolute homerun,” Goodwin said.
He said a planned four-month extension of the pilot study could illuminate the results.
“There are some good scientific reasons for doing that [extension] study,” Goodwin said.
Goodwin said the company hopes the results will be intriguing to scientists and potential investors alike. The company plans to start raising a round of funding for the larger pivotal study later this year.
“If this works, it’s going to be worth a lot,” Goowin said.
NeuroEM said one limitation of its study is that it had no control group of patients receiving a placebo treatment with which to compare results.
“However, the improvements in multiple cognitive measures observed with [transcranial electromagnetic treatment] would have been highly unlikely to occur spontaneously in [Alzheimer’s] subjects, even with repeated testing,” NeuroEM CEO Gary Arendash and his group of study co-authors wrote.
NeuroEM hopes to launch a larger “pivotal study,” possibly next year, that would have a control group.
Another challenge for NeuroEM is that when all eight patients were counted, some of their cognitive improvement results were not “statistically significant” — which in the world of clinical studies means there was more than a 5 percent chance that the results were a product of random chance.
However, all eight patients saw statistically significant improvements in their ability to immediately recall words at the end of the two-month treatment as well as 14 days after that.
Goodwin credited local inventor and investor Eric Knight for NeuroEM’s progress thus far. Knight licensed some of his own electromagnetic-related technology to NeuroEM four years ago, and helped to corral the Connecticut investments.
“This company would not be where it is without Eric,” he said.
