Improving Brain Health with OptiChronix

According to the WHO, good brain health is “a state in which every individual can realize their own abilities and optimize their cognitive, emotional, psychological and behavioural functioning to cope with life situations.” Founded in 2020 and located in Schönenbuch, Switzerland, the American-Swiss Digital Health company OptiChronix improves brain health with paired digital health apps.

Therefore, our ecosystem startup provides a late life dementia risk predictor, continuous screening for cognitive change and focusses on modifiable factors in ones lifestyle and current health status as early as for people in their mid-forties.

In an interview with 5-HT Dr. Albrecht Tribukait, Co-founder and Chief Regulatory & Quality Compliance Officer of OptiChronixs, explains myAVOS: a digital solution at the intersection of biomedical, behavioural, computing and engineering research. myAVOS is deployed on smartphones to personalize, track and improve a user's health by collecting data from other wearables and nearables.

Dr. Albrecht Tribukait, Co-founder and Chief Regulatory & Quality Compliance Officer of OptiChronixs

How would you explain your solution in three sentences to a professional colleague from the 
health sector?

"Today, dementia patients are stuck in a reactionary care intervention model. We have created myAVOS, a digital ecosystem enabled to predict late-life risk from your healthy mid forties, that tracks cognitive change and then addresses specific modifaible risk factors to prevent or delay the onset of cognitive decline. 
Our goal is to transform the experience for patients, providers, caregivers, and payors through a personalized, digital-first engagement model."

What problem motivated you to start the company?

"In Germany only 4 approved active substances against Alzheimer's are currently available. This has not changed over the last 20 years, as the development of new effective Alzheimer's drugs has had a failure rate of no less than 99.6% since 2002. We are pursuing a different treatment strategy, aimed to give patients and their relatives and caregivers a means by which they can learn to better manage dementia and influence a number of risk factors associated with the disease, like high blood pressure, obesity, diabetes, depression, physical inactivity, smoking and depression, in such way that its inevitable course is slowed down."

How do you convince a pharmaceutical company, a health insurance company or another potential client to set up a pilot project with you?

"In medicine, "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure", or so the saying goes. Our solution is re-imagining Healthy Brain Aging by creating and enabling digital dementia ecosystems with our patent-pending AI/ML technology for long-term prevention, engagement and retention, benefitting all stakeholders:

• Patients benefit from delayed onset of cognitive decline, earlier detection, continued monitoring of cognition and mental health outcomes, improved medication outcomes, and longer independence.

• Caregivers benefit from risk prediction, earlier detection of cognitive change, curated answers to frequently asked questions, information about their loved ones, support with "caregiver burden", and lifestyle change as preventative medicine.

• Clinicians benefit from faster detection of cognitive impairment, faster referral from GP to specialist, optimizing timely visits of patients that need care now, and minimizing revolving door / follow up visits.

• Payors benefit from better outcomes leading to savings, delayed institutionalized care, and better 
  engagement with customers."

The team of OptiChronix (f.l.t.r.): Devon Lodge, Albrecht Tribukait, Anna Grabowski, Rene Gilvert, Swayambhu Raparti, Roger Bullock and Mark Edwards

Who are your current customer (groups) and who do you want your potential customers to be?

"We are in final negotiations with St Pancras Hospital to have myAVOS tested by no less than 80 patients. We also have letters of support from Prof. Robert Pernezcky from LMU Munich, Prof. Lutz Fröhlich from ZI Mannheim, Dr. Stuart Ratcliffe from St Pancras, Prof. Reto Kressis from University Geriatric Medicine FELIX PLATTER & University of Basel, and will start conversations with Maurizio Fava from Harvard Medical School.

In line with our Regulatory & Clinical Roadmap we are aiming to launch myAVOS in the United States in Q3/2022, and in the UK, Germany and other EU Member States in 2024."

Where do you see yourself in 3 years and how can 5-HT support you?

"myAVOS is an ALL in ONE platform designed in consultation with the end-users.. they want unification and simplification. Our goals for the next 3 years include to achieve break-even, be present in the US and across EU markets with a CE Marking Class IIa(MDR), launch myAVOS as DIGA in Germany and in the UK as NICE DHI class 3b, and continue with our geographical expansion.

5-HT can support us by helping us find partners that are willing to pilot the MVP and Alpha release."