Advancing multimodal precision medicine for Alzheimer's disease

The two companies will work together to create a first-of-kind, multimodal approach to improve early identification, patient stratification and longitudinal monitoring in Alzheimer's disease (AD).

The collaboration brings together two complementary technologies that measure distinct aspects of disease aetiology: blood-based molecular signatures of neurodegeneration and disease progression and objective digital measures of cognitive function. Together, the companies intend to demonstrate a new frontline diagnostic paradigm that combines objective measures of digital cognitive function and disease biology.

The integrated approach is designed to create a scalable and efficient digital-first pathway that assesses cognitive function followed by a confirmatory disease biology and pathology blood test. This pathway fits naturally into routine clinical workflows, reduces reliance on specialist-based assessment, and enables earlier interventions when they can have the greatest impact. As part of the collaboration, the companies plan to conduct real-world evidence studies evaluating the combined workflow in clinical research and frontline care settings, with the first pilots expected to launch later this year.

As the Alzheimer's therapeutic landscape shifts toward earlier intervention, the ability to identify individuals at risk before irreversible neurodegeneration has occurred is becoming one of the defining challenges in healthcare. The arrival of disease targeting therapies is reshaping Alzheimer's care. Yet most patients are still diagnosed too late because current diagnostic pathways remain fragmented, specialist-dependent, and difficult to scale.

By combining molecular evidence of neurodegeneration with rapid and sensitive measures of functional change, the collaboration aims to generate evidence for a practical frontline workflow in which a 10-minute, self-administered objective cognitive function assessment can be completed before a circRNA blood biomarker testing is ordered to confirm disease biology. This approach is designed to help reduce reliance on subjective specialist-based neuropsychological batteries that can take hours, streamline referral and treatment decisions, expand specialist capacity, monitor treatment effectiveness more objectively, and extend access beyond specialty neurology and memory clinics and into primary care.

The announcement follows the publication of Circular Genomics' Nature Medicine study demonstrating that a blood-based circRNA signature predicts progression to symptomatic Alzheimer's disease years before clinical onset and provides information complementary to established amyloid and tau biomarkers. It also builds on Altoida's growing body of peer-reviewed research, including its recently published study in Alzheimer's and Dementia: Diagnosis, Assessment & Disease Monitoring (DADM) demonstrating that the Digital NeuroMarker Platform can accurately detect mild cognitive impairment though a brief self-administered digital assessment, and, when deployed before blood biomarker testing, complements molecular diagnostics while improving the overall performance of a scalable frontline Alzheimer's diagnostic workflow. Altoida is now preparing to initiate a pivotal study intended to support FDA clearance of the Digital NeuroMarker Platform for use across healthcare settings.

"The future of Alzheimer's detection and precision neurology will not be built around a single biomarker; but on combining complementary biological signals with cognitive function assessment. Our CircPath platform provides a fundamentally new window into the biology of neurodegeneration, and together with Altoida's digital phenotyping capabilities we believe we can help accelerate therapeutic development while moving the field toward more personalised care earlier in the disease process," said Paul Sargeant, CEO Circular Genomics.

"Biology and function answer different but essential questions: which biological disease pathways are occurring and how are they affecting the individual patient in everyday life," said Marc Jones, CEO Altoida, "By studying them together, we aim to help drug developers enrich trials, stratify patients and measure change more precisely today, while generating the evidence required for a scalable frontline health care tomorrow."

Together, Circular Genomics and Altoida aim to establish a new multimodal model for precision neurology: improving Alzheimer's drug development today while enabling a future with a more scalable and efficient patient care path.