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Digital health technologies (DHTs) for drug development in CNS diseases

Published on September 30, 2026   21 min

Other Talks in the Series: Periodic Reports: Advances in Clinical Interventions and Research Platforms

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0:00
Hello, everyone. Thank you so much to HSTalks for inviting me to present a lecture to you today around our journey advancing much needed digital health technologies for disorders of the nervous system, particularly Parkinson's disease. By way of background, I'm currently serving as the Vice President of Neurology at the Critical Path Institute, a non-profit organization located in Tucson, Arizona, with global outreach. I'm honored to speak to you today around a very exciting topic considering my background of more than 30 years as a neuroscientist.
0:38
We know today so much more about the brain than we did when I started my career. But we have so much more to learn. What's really interesting now is that different neuronal systems are affected in the brain across different neurodegenerative disorders, which leads to a concept, historically, that each disease has a whole distinct unique profile and need for treatment. We also know that clinical trials for brain disorders, especially neurodegenerative disorders have the highest failure rate of all diseases. Yet the global burden of disease is accelerating at an astonishing rate. We need new methodologies and especially we need to leverage innovative technologies to help us go from where we are to where we need to be to halt, slow down, or even reverse the chronic progressive degeneration of these disorders.
1:31
Interestingly, the number of failures is astonishing. But if you look at the clinical trials that have been carried out across age-related degenerative disorders, most of the trials are carried out after people are diagnosed, when we know that the disease starts decades before, and these review articles really tell us that we need prevention. We need to get in and intervene way early, when the earliest signs of the disease happen prior to onset of symptoms and to get there, we need to work together to shape what does it look like to target prevention because no one organization can do this on their own. That's where the Critical Path Institute comes in.

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Digital health technologies (DHTs) for drug development in CNS diseases

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