Rune Labs, a company using aggregated brain data to empower the development and delivery of precision medicines for neurological and psychiatric diseases, and global healthcare firm Medtronic have announced a new project designed to better understand the effects of neurostimulation in order to improve patient care. This collaboration will use Rune’s proprietary software platform to integrate, analyse and display data captured from Medtronic’s Percept PC neurostimulator, along with data from the StrivePD Apple Watch application and other sources.
The Medtronic Percept PC neurostimulator with BrainSense technology is the first and only complete deep brain stimulation (DBS) system able to chronically capture and record brain signals while delivering therapy to patients with neurologic disorders associated with Parkinson’s disease, essential tremor, dystonia, and epilepsy, according to a Rune press release.
The company’s software platform will deliver data from Medtronic’s neurostimulation device to participating clinicians in a unique and objective way to support patient-specific treatment decisions. This includes the continuous monitoring of local field potentials (LFPs) one 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.
Under the terms of the project, Rune Labs will provide access to the Rune software platform for a select number of DBS centres. The plan includes 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, the release states.
“Neuromodulation devices are adding to the large pool of brain data available, but there has been limited progress in utilising this data to directly impact Parkinson’s disease treatment,” said Brian Pepin, founder and CEO of Rune. “By leveraging our software to incorporate LFP data collected from the Medtronic Percept PC neurostimulator, we can provide participating doctors with novel clinical information to support personalised 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 utilisation and remote patient monitoring.”
“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,” added Rob Raike, 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.”
