Brain data precision medicine company Rune Labs has announced a collaboration with Medical device company Medtronic to better understand the data showing the effects of neurostimulation and how they can be used to provide better, more personalized patient care. Under the terms of the collaborations, Rune will leverage its software platform to integrate analyze, and display data it captures from Medtronic’s Percept PC Neurostimulator, along with data from the StrivePD Apple Watch application and other sources.
“We are always looking for opportunities to better serve patients, and Rune’s platform is an ideal vehicle to further our understanding of clinically beneficial roles for BrainSense data,” says Rob Raike, Ph.D., Distinguished Scientist, Medtronic. “With the rise of virtual medicine prompted by the COVID-19 pandemic, remote patient monitoring with objective data has become a critical need. By adding BrainSense data to the Rune platform as part of this project, we are taking an important step towards improving decision support options for clinicians caring for DBS patients. We believe this will offer unique insights to how patients are experiencing and responding to their DBS therapy and medical therapies in real-world environments.”
The project will include up to 1,000 patients with Parkinson’s disease implanted with a Percept PC neurostimulator. Each patient will be monitored using the integrated software platform over a 12-month period. Patients can use Rune’s StrivePD software application on the Apple Watch, while clinicians use the Rune clinical dashboard to monitor and review patient data.
Rune will deliver the information it captures from the Medtronic Percept PC Neurostimulator with BrainSense technology, to clinicians who are part of the research project to help support patient-specific treatment decisions. The technology from Medtronic is the first deep brain stimulation (DBS) system that can chronically capture and record brain signals while also delivering therapy to patients with neurological disorders such as Parkinson’s disease, essential tremor, dystonia, and epilepsy.
Rune’s software platform allows for the continuous monitoring of local field potentials (LFPs), which are a million times smaller than DBS stimulation pulses that can correlate with Parkinson’s disease symptoms, giving doctors data that may guide treatment. Rune’s software will also integrate data from additional sources, including a patient wearable, patient-reported symptoms and medication dosing, and provide participating clinicians with the ability to access a holistic view of all of this data.
“Neuromodulation devices are adding to the large pool of brain data available, but there has been limited progress in utilizing this data to directly impact Parkinson’s disease treatment,” said Brian Pepin, founder and CEO, Rune Labs. “By leveraging our software to incorporate LFP data collected from the Medtronic PerceptTM PC neurostimulator, we can provide participating doctors with novel clinical information to support personalized patient care. This collaboration represents progress in the neuromodulation space, which currently lags behind fields such as cardiology and diabetes in terms of both objective data utilization and remote patient monitoring.”
