Saccade Diagnostics
Saccade Diagnostics is a pre-spin out stage commercial opportunity of an assistive tool to inform the diagnostic process for schizophrenia and related disorders. The tool is being developed by Dr Philip Benson and Professor David St Clair at the University of Aberdeen.
Major psychiatric disorders are the largest cause of disability worldwide. In contrast to other branches of medicine at this time there are no non symptom based diagnostic tests for any of the major psychiatric disorders encountered in clinical practice and diagnosis is made solely on patient history, signs and symptoms. The assistive tool ('SaccScan') delivers a series of eye movement tests that are administered to patients. When these are compared to eye movements from a large reference database from patients with major psychiatric disorders and normal controls it is possible to give a diagnostic probability with exceptional sensitivity and specificity. Diagnosis can be given in realtime, or a few days later after corroboration by an eye movement expert.
The SaccScan eye tests are designed to be fast and easy to administer. The test takes around 30 minutes during which the patient looks at a series of images on a computer screen, and eye movements are recorded by an unobtrusive infrared camera. Schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and severe depression can currently be distinguished from each other and normal controls at around 95% accuracy. When other reference psychiatric disorders are also included in the database, the outstanding sensitivity and specificity is likely to be maintained.Dr Benson and Professor St Clair are working together with the University towards commercialising SaccScan in a new University spin out company 'Saccade Diagnostics'. Through 2013, the team will continue to expand considerably the reference database through clinical trials which will enable the new company to roll out a 3-tier service for psychiatry, neurology and general practice. The service will comprise SaccScan - the eye movement test; SaccDiff - an assisted differential diagnosis process, along with healthcare consultation SaccPlan - longer-term treatment plan options.
The Saccade Diagnostics team are keen to hear from parties interested in discussing opportunities for collaboration, commercial partnership and investment. If you are interested in finding out more about the opportunity please do contact us.
University of Aberdeen
King's College
Aberdeen
AB24 3FX