Our Curiosity Never Stops

Dr. Cornelia Dorner-Ciossek

Research on brain diseases is one of the most complex fields of medical science, but it is an area vital to our future health. Development in the area of brain diseases has unique challenges, which underscore the need for continued research in the field.

At Boehringer Ingelheim, we remain committed to finding solutions for people living with mental illness. As Director in discovery research for the central nervous system (CNS), I am proud and fortunate to be close to the new discoveries and breakthroughs our CNS research team is making, in the pursuit of improving patients’ lives.

The future has arrived and it is changing how we conduct brain research

Our toolbox is expanding, with new possibilities brought by digital technologies. Technological advancements have enabled smartphones and wearables to be commonplace and extremely sophisticated. Researchers are exploring how we can use this technology to both diagnose mental illness and help people to manage their disease. This includes passive symptom tracking and active support for patients, enabling technology to deliver a therapeutic benefit of its own. From the researcher’s perspective, digital phenotyping will allow us to further close the gap between pre-clinical research on brain circuits and corresponding behavior to the assessment of human physiology, behavior and self-reports. And this is only the beginning of the neuroscience evolution!

Voice analysis, wearable technology and GPS tracking

An area of particular focus within neuro-research is voice and speech analysis. Researchers are analyzing if changes in voice can help us to understand if someone may develop schizophrenia, depression or psychosis. For example, the fluency of speech and articulation, difficulties in finding the correct word, the syntax of the sentences – all of these parameters and many more can be analyzed with sophisticated algorithms and could allow us to detect disease worsening much earlier than the standard tests.

In neuro-research, wearables offer another tool for researchers who are using technology to gather biometric data, such as sleep patterns, which can provide a more detailed picture of the participant’s lifestyle and overall health. Similarly, GPS tracking can be used to trace people’s mobility, or lack of activity, which can be an indicator of depression.

Insight into how technology is advancing neuro-research efforts

We see this with the work of Prof. Dr. Jukka-Pekka Onnela from Harvard University, which is helping to pave the way in using digital technology for neuro-research with the Beiwe research platform. At a mental health clinic in Boston in 2018, a pilot study was conducted. In the study, 17 patients with schizophrenia in an active state were asked to use the Beiwe app on their smartphones for up to three months. The researchers then tested for changes in mobility patterns and social behavior collected through the smartphones and were able to identify statistically significant anomalies in patient behavior in the days prior to relapse.¹ This is a powerful example of how digital technology is opening new avenues of exploration in our quest to find more effective ways to diagnose and treat people living with mental illness.

Speaking on the topic, Dr. Onnela stated: “In the future I would like to see the psychiatric lab being less and less an actual physical lab and space, but what I would like to move towards personally is a situation where the phenotyping and interventions are increasingly done outside of the lab and I think that smartphones offer a reasonable opportunity for us to do this.”²

Boehringer Ingelheim is using technology to achieve better patient outcomes

Here at Boehringer Ingelheim, one of our research areas of focus is exploring ways to combine digital technologies with innovative medicines to achieve better outcomes for people living with mental illness all while prioritizing patient health and privacy.

There are different ways we are using technology to advance our research and these fall into two categories: digital phenotyping and risk analysis and digital therapeutics.

Looking at the former first, we have three approaches which fall under this category.

First, data. Complex patient data sets, including behavior and attitudes, can be analyzed electronically to help us better understand mental illness symptoms.

Second, artificial intelligence. We are working with technologies which enable machines to understand, analyze and learn, resulting in much faster and more accurate decision making across the patient journey.

Third, smart devices. We are using sensors to measure people’s real-time physiological and behavioral data, paired with their smart devices.

Finally, in digital therapeutics, we are working towards providing non-drug therapeutics to enhance the efficacy of future medicines. By leveraging digital phenotyping and digital therapeutics, we aim to maximize the potential of our medicines.

All of this work gives me hope that we will find new solutions for people with mental illness through our research, and that we will continue to adapt and evolve our research as technology advances.

For Boehringer Ingelheim this means our Commitment Never Stops.

Footnotes

1. Barnett I, Torous J, Staples P, Sandoval L, Keshavan M, Onnela JP. Relapse prediction in schizophrenia through digital phenotyping: a pilot study. Neuropsychopharmacology. 2018.

2. Jukka-Pekka Onnela (Harvard) speaks at the Technology in Psychiatry Summit 2017. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjCrvCac9jE. Last accessed May 2020