On 5 December, the company Functional Neuromodulation reported that 30 patients with mild Alzheimer’s disease have been successfully implanted in the ongoing Advance study.
Advance is evaluating the safety and potential clinical benefit of deep brain stimulation of the fornix, a major inflow and output pathway in the brain’s memory circuit, for patients with mild Alzheimer’s. This important enrolment milestone and positive safety reviews by the Data Safety Monitoring Board have triggered follow-on funding from existing investors Genesys Capital, Foundation Medical Partners and Medtronic. The company expects study enrolment to be completed with at least 40 patients implanted by the end of the first quarter 2014.
“Our investigators at seven leading North American research centres have done an excellent job of enrolling patients with early Alzheimer’s disease and fulfilling the protocol,” said Dan O’Connell, co-founder and CEO of Functional Neuromodulation. “We expect to have top-line outcomes data in the second quarter of 2015, and we are hopeful that stimulation of memory circuits will ultimately prove to be effective for this challenging and devastating disease.”
