chronostics: UCL startup transforming Alzheimer's clinical trials with Alzfinder platform

By developing the Alzfinder platform rooted in UCL research, medtech startup chronostics is revolutionizing Alzheimer's clinical trials, rescuing promising drugs from the pharmaceutical graveyard.

Chronostics™ is a medtech startup stemming from UCL research seeking to revolutionize computational medicine and healthcare. They specialise in building and deploying data-driven models to empower clinical trials and healthcare initiatives, with a key focus on unravelling the heterogeneity of age-related chronic conditions — a high priority challenge in modern medicine with a significant socioeconomic burden.

Upon acceptance to the CDI Impact Accelerator, chronostics was particularly impressed by AWS's global scalability, which can support the company’s ambitions for growth. The CDI provided vital cloud DevOps support to propel chronostics toward establishing a scalable computational infrastructure to meet customer demand.

The challenge 

Alzheimer’s disease is the leading cause of dementia and currently ranks among the top ten contributors to global mortality. Its associated care expenses alone cost the global economy over $1.3T per year and is projected to more than double by 2050 according to the World Health Organisation (WHO, 2021a; WHO 2021b). Finding a drug that works on even a subset of patients could save billions of dollars and prevent untold heartache. Clinical decision-making in Alzheimer’s disease is a formidable challenge, particularly in clinical trials of new drugs.

Despite over $43 billion invested over the past 25+ years, 99% of promising Alzheimer’s drugs have been relegated to the pharmaceutical graveyard, in part because it’s seemingly impossible to predict who will and won’t benefit from a drug — and when. This exerts immense stress upon clinical researchers tasked with trial recruitment and will similarly impact patient management with a handful of new drugs entering the market in the past two years.

The solution

Numerous academic research papers propose novel methodologies, claiming potential impact for neurological clinical trials. However, commitment to backing up these claims by building something is scarce. In contrast, the visionary founder team of chronostics embraced an alternative path. Motivated by their own research findings at UCL, which revealed significant differences in disease progression subtypes, they established a company with a clear mission to effect transformative change. Their aim is to optimise drug development efficiency through targeting the right patients and the right time for clinical trials, leveraging proprietary technologies developed by the company.

The AlzFinder platform 

The chronostics solution “AlzFinder™” can reduce uncertainty in patient management and recruitment for clinical trials in Alzheimer’s disease. From a single brain scan uploaded to secure servers in the AWS cloud, AlzFinder can return a quantitative report and patient risk profile overnight! Additionally, the chronostics team can bring expert humans into the loop to provide bespoke insights and decision support. More generally, chronostics leverages their unique combination of expertise in mathematical modelling and unsupervised machine learning to build quantitative data-driven solutions to support clinical decisions and inform on clinical trial design, starting in neurological diseases.

The AlzFinder™ technology is built on a decade of world-leading research into Alzheimer’s disease progression. chronostics™ has worked with pharmaceutical companies to validate the technology that underpins AlzFinder™ on data from past clinical trials, where they found differential treatment response in AlzFinder™ subgroups. This paves the way for revival of zombie drugs from the pharmaceutical graveyard, novel clinical trial designs empowered by AlzFinder™ (with huge time and cost savings, and reduced patient burden), and lucrative companion diagnostic products on the front line of healthcare worldwide.

CDI Impact 

With CDI support, chronostics™ embarked on its journey into cloud-based computing infrastructure, starting with a semi-automated service for analysing large datasets from unsuccessful clinical trials. The cloud DevOps support provided by UCL Advanced Research Computing software engineers and AWS solutions architects was invaluable for establishing a robust code infrastructure backend that enables chronostics™ to build and launch multiple products and services independently.

Furthermore, with a strong focus on the impact for end users of chronostics™’ solution, their participation in the CDI programme has played a pivotal role in transforming their customer service approach. They have shifted from labour-intensive manual analyses to a fully cloud-based semi-automated solution, resulting in more efficient and streamlined processes for serving their customers.

Dr Neil Oxtoby, CEO and Co-founder of chronostics™, summarises his experience with the CDI:

“As the only chronostics™ founder on this CDI journey, I had to balance both technical and business development on my own. Having already made considerable progress on business development, I benefited most from CDI’s technical support related to cloud development. I went from being a complete novice to having a basic competency in Cloud DevOps! Without the CDI’s support I would not have had the bandwidth to achieve the near full-functioning cloud infrastructure I developed for the first product at chronostics™. Thank you to the entire CDI team!”

References

• World Health Organisation. (2021a). Global status report on the public health response to dementia. [online] Available at: who.int/publications/i/item/9789240033245.
• World Health Organisation. (2021b). Dementia: a public health priority. [online] Available at: who.int/publications/i/item/dementia-a-public-health-priority.