Patent claims for technology to assess Parkinson’s disease issued to Great Lakes Neurotechnologies

Jun 6 2012

Great Lakes NeuroTechnologies announced today that the U.S. Patent Office has issued claims under patent number 8,187,209 covering their Movement Disorder Monitoring System and Method for quantitative assessment of motor symptoms associated with movement disorders.

These intellectual property claims will help to protect the significantly growing market segment for their Kinesia technology platforms.

The Kinesia™ and Kinesia HomeView™ systems include wireless patient-worn motion sensors to assess tremor, bradykinesia, rigidity, and dyskinesias associated with diseases like Parkinson’s and essential tremor.

Market applications include both in-clinic and home-based patient care, optimizing programming for deep brain stimulation, and providing quantitative endpoints to determine efficacy of clinical trials. Physicians utilize a web interface to track symptom responses and fluctuations for telemedicine applications.

The issued claims include a portable movement disorder device for measuring severity of a patient’s movement disorder symptoms of tremor, bradykinesia, rigidity, or dyskinesia in real-time.

The severity of a patient’s movement disorder symptoms is calculated based on information from a movement or a biopotential sensor worn by the patient to measure body motion which may also be wirelessly transmitted to a computer or a monitor for processing.

Finally, the claims cover the processing of the collected motion data into symptom severity scores and optionally transmitting the information over the Internet for review by clinicians.

For the last decade, the team at Great Lakes NeuroTechnologies has been committed to the development of the Kinesia and Kinesia HomeView medical technology platforms.

“Great Lakes NeuroTechnologies is now uniquely positioned in the movement disorders market as a global leader in medical device manufacture and commercialization of technologies to standardize, automate, and remotely capture movement disorder patient assessments.” says Joseph P. Giuffrida, PhD, President.

“Our expertise in technology development and clinical validation is only part of our successful commercialization path. We have also strongly engaged in other critical components of market development including FDA clearance, ISO certification, CE mark, expanded marketing and sales, and now broad claims for intellectual property protection.” Dr. Giuffrida also thanked the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke and the National Institute on Aging for their continued support of these technologies.

As the company’s research and development arm is expanding its clinical trials and technology applications, building its intellectual property portfolio remains a priority both domestically and internationally.

Brian Kolkowski, PhD, Executive Vice-President and General Counsel stated “The broad claims that were awarded with this initial patent should provide a significant competitive advantage in the growing movement disorder diagnostics and therapy market. The portable movement disorder system claims also include administering a drug from a reservoir based on the calculated severity of the subject's movement disorder. The awarded claims provide a strong intellectual property foundation on which our other submitted patent applications and international filings should continue to build.”

Source: Great Lakes NeuroTechnologies