Source: GlobalData
DHTs promise detection of disease progression in early PD patients receiving symptomatic treatment, says GlobalData
Posted in Pharma
At the recently held AD/PD 2025 International Conference on Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s Diseases, Roche outlined the effectiveness of digital health technologies (DHTs) in providing more sensitive measures of disease progression in early Parkinson’s disease (PD). There are no pathological or imaging-based biomarkers to measure a PD patient’s progression. Instead, physicians rely on clinical examinations and obtaining a history of symptoms. DHTs are poised to help bolster the density of outcome data in PD clinical trials, says GlobalData, a leading data and analytics company.
Jos Opdenakker, Pharma Analyst at GlobalData, comments: “DHTs can measure symptom fluctuations and variability frequently and remotely, allowing them to be quantified and aggregated. This can help build more robust outcome measures in PD clinical trials, allowing for the development of more effective agents.”
The progression of PD as measured on clinical scales, such as the Hoehn and Yahr (HY) scale and the Movement Disorder Society-Sponsored Revision of the Unified Parkinson’s Disease Rating Scale (MDS-UPDRS), is slow. This has implications on the costs and duration of clinical trials evaluating early PD agents, as the trials will have to be run for longer to discern the effectiveness of pipeline treatments.
Furthermore, symptomatic treatments tend to be effective in controlling all cardinal signs of PD. As such, it is difficult to measure disease progression with traditional measures. DHTs can aid investigators by bolstering sensitivity to disease progression, even when PD patients are well controlled under symptomatic treatments.
According to the key opinion leaders (KOLs) previously interviewed by GlobalData, there is an unmet need for validated clinical endpoints and biomarkers to evaluate disease progression in PD. The DHTs being pioneered by Roche would be well placed to address this unmet need, as they offer objective data to measure symptom fluctuations. More precise measurements of everyday motor fluctuations would be able to fill in the blanks caused by the infrequent collection of clinical data.
In the E-Poster presented at AD/PD, Roche investigated the potential of DHTs to measure disease progression in a subset of patients with early PD under stable symptomatic treatment who were enrolled either in the PASADENA trial or the McGill observational study. The PASADENA trial implemented a smart watch, which was used by patients to passively measure aspects of motor function such as mobility and gait. The watch, coupled with Roche’s PD Mobile Application v2 smartphone application, actively measured motor function through targeted tests.
The data presented by Roche at AD/PD instills confidence in DHTs and points toward a potential roadmap for honing optimally reliable and valid measures of disease progression in early PD. The results were driven by a small cohort, and a large-scale study is needed to validate the use of DHTs. The use of DHTs could facilitate the development of more effective clinical endpoints for use in PD clinical trials, which would be beneficial for investigating the efficacy of pipeline assets that may slow or halt disease progression.
Opdenakker concludes: “The integration of DHTs into PD presents a transformative step forward in addressing longstanding challenges in measuring disease progression. By enabling frequent, remote, and objective assessments of motor fluctuations and variability, DHTs provide more robust and sensitive outcome data to supplement traditional clinical scales. As PD remains a complex and unpredictable neurodegenerative disorder, digital innovations offer promising opportunities to refine therapeutic strategies, improve patient care, and address the unmet need for reliable biomarkers. These advancements will pave the way for more precise interventions and a deeper understanding of PD progression, ultimately benefiting patients and researchers alike.”