European brain aging study adds eye movement biomarkers to track early neurological change

NeuraLight’s eye movement-based biomarkers will be integrated into the Healthy Brain Ageing initiative, a European study examining changes in brain function and the risk of developing Parkinson’s disease.

The Baseline

• NeuraLight’s eye movement-based biomarkers will be integrated into the Healthy Brain Ageing initiative as an additional measure of brain function.
• The European study has enrolled nearly 13,000 adults to investigate factors associated with Parkinson’s disease risk and changes that may occur before clinical symptoms appear.
• The biomarkers will be used alongside the study's biological and clinical measures, creating an opportunity to evaluate digital biomarkers longitudinally at population scale.

NeuraLight has announced that its brain function biomarkers will be used as part of the Healthy Brain Ageing (HeBA) initiative, a large prospective study investigating early changes associated with neurodegenerative disease. The integration will add eye movement-based measures to the study’s existing assessments for examining changes in neurological function over time.

The HeBA initiative has enrolled nearly 13,000 adults aged 50 to 80 across Germany, Austria, Spain, and Luxembourg. The study aims to investigate factors associated with the risk of developing Parkinson’s disease and changes that may occur before clinical symptoms appear. Supported by The Michael J Fox Foundation, with its data platform led by the Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine, the study combines biological and clinical assessments with prospective follow-up. The study uses biological and clinical measures to assess participants, and NeuraLight’s biomarkers, derived from eye movements governed by distributed neural networks, will be incorporated as an additional measure of brain function. According to NeuraLight, they are designed to quantify function across specific neural circuits, including those that can be affected during aging and neurodegenerative disease.

HeBA is investigating changes that may occur up to a decade before symptoms appear, when differences in brain function may not yet be captured by conventional clinical assessments. By analyzing the eye movement-based measures alongside HeBA’s existing biological and clinical data, researchers will be able to assess how changes in neurological function develop over time and how they relate to other indicators of neurodegenerative disease risk. The large, prospective study also provides an opportunity to generate evidence on the potential utility of digital biomarkers for measuring early disease-related change at population scale.

Commenting on the collaboration, Edmund Ben-Ami, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of NeuraLight, said:

“Our precise, quantitative measures of brain function will add a crucial new layer to the infrastructure that already exists to study neurodegenerative disease at its earliest stages, revealing a clear view of decline as it unfolds and advancing wider knowledge about healthy aging and longevity.”