Great Lakes NeuroTechnologies receives another patent for Parkinson’s disease monitoring technology

Feb 5 2014

Great Lakes NeuroTechnologies announced today they have received another allowance of claims from the U.S. Patent Office. The application covers a system and method of controlling Parkinson's therapy in response to motor symptoms. The allowed claims include a portable system for measuring, quantifying, and treating Parkinson's disease, based on a calculated severity of tremor, bradykinesia, rigidity, or dyskinesia. The claims also include sensors for detecting Parkinson's symptoms, calculating symptom severity based on those sensors, and then controlling therapy, such as deep brain stimulation (DBS) or drug release in response to symptom severity. This is the third patent awarded to the company over the last seven months, establishing a growing intellectual property portfolio in the movement disorders market space.

Parkinson's disease impacts quality of life for millions of people around the world. Tremor, slowed movements, episodes of freezing, gait abnormalities, and therapy side effects that result in abnormal movements can have a major impact on individual quality of life and ability to complete activities of daily living. GLNT commercialized Kinesia [ http://www.glneurotech.com/kinesia/ ] technology to assess and visualize these types of movement disorder symptoms for in-clinic and telemedicine applications. "Over the last decade our biomedical research team has developed intelligent algorithms based on small, patient-worn sensors to quantify Parkinson's symptoms with minimal patient burden", says Joseph P. Giuffrida, PhD, President and Principal Investigator. "As features and options for therapies such as DBS and drug delivery systems are becoming more targeted, they can also become more complicated to use. A natural extension and growth opportunity for our Kinesia platform is to integrate directly with these and other therapies. This may minimize setup and programming with intelligent closed-loop sensing strategies that can adjust a patient's therapy in direct response to measured symptoms." 

Allowance of these claims follows two additional patents the company was recently awarded in 2013. Expansion of the development of new technologies and applications by the biomedical research team at the company is driving aggressive intellectual property activity in both domestic and international markets. "As our market share continues to increase for existing technology and our team launches new products, we continue to broaden our intellectual property and strengthen our pipeline of submitted applications", says Brian Kolkowski, PhD, Executive Vice-President and General Counsel. "This particular patent when issued will be helpful to protect future markets for strategic partnerships we may establish to integrate therapy and diagnostics into a common platform, and more importantly to improve patient care and physician experience with respect to Parkinson's disease".