New Digital Therapeutics Are the Best Hope to Address Dementia

LONDON, Nov. 09, 2017 -- Dr. Henry Mahncke, CEO of Posit Science, the maker of BrainHQ online brain exercises and assessments, is advising world health and business leaders gathered at the Financial Times Global Pharmaceutical and Biotechnology Conference that “the best hope to address dementia” is new digital therapeutics, such as plasticity-based brain-training software.

“Over the past two decades, virtually all the resources to develop new treatments to fight dementia have focused on developing new drugs based on the theory that amyloid plaque was the sole cause of the disease, and that removing amyloid would cure the disease,” said Dr. Mahncke. “Unfortunately, this just hasn't worked — scores of drugs have failed, and an enormous amount of time, money, and effort from corporations and governments has been squandered. What's worse is that this intense focus on amyloid has squeezed out many other promising approaches.”

Yet, over the same period, Dr. Mahncke noted, tremendous breakthroughs have been made in basic neuroscience — explaining the underlying nature of the brain as an integrated organ, and how its health can be maintained — or degraded.

“In basic research, we have moved away from a mechanistic model of the brain with parts that wear out as you age, to a model based on lifelong brain plasticity, where the activity of the brain — what you ask your brain to do — regulates the health of the brain,” Dr. Mahncke observed. “It’s been more two decades since we proved the brain is plastic — capable of powerful self-organizing chemical, structural and functional change — throughout life. However, clinical thinking has not caught up with scientific thinking, so the treatment approaches we see remain shamefully enmeshed in old ideas.”

Dr. Mahncke reviewed some of the more than 100 peer-reviewed papers on the exercises in BrainHQ, noting they show that relatively small amounts of plasticity-based brain-training drive chemical, structural and functional improvements in older brains, including among those at greatest risk of dementia and those diagnosed with pre-dementia.

“Last year, the independent researchers who ran a 2800-person, NIH-funded, ten-year randomized controlled trial on cognitive training and aging announced that they had found — for the first time — that there is an intervention that can significantly lower dementia risk, and that intervention was a form of plasticity-based brain training that was used in the study for only 10-18 hours,” Dr. Mahncke said. “This kind of breakthrough deserves the level of scientific, clinical, and healthcare system focus that has traditionally been given to drug development, especially given the failures of the pharmaceutical pipeline.”

Dr. Mahncke noted that plasticity-based brain training could be a “ubiquitous and cheap” approach to addressing dementia, other intractable cognitive disorders, and lifelong brain health monitoring.

“Those in healthcare leadership, who are interested in better health outcomes and lower costs, have no more promising prospect than harnessing the brain’s own plasticity to address its weaknesses and achieve and maintain peak performance,” Dr. Mahncke concluded. “Those looking for the next multi-billion-dollar drug for dementia will apparently keep tilting at windmills – but let’s not let them kidnap our brain health agenda.”

For more information, contact [email protected]