Is the Future of Health Pre-Symptom?

Most of us would agree that it’s better to prevent a disease than treat a disease. After all, many diseases don’t have a cure, and the ones that do are often challenging, debilitating, and expensive to treat.

Despite these facts, modern medicine is usually reactive because prevention can be costly, imprecise and slow – not great traits to drive adoption.

But, what if there were a better answer then prevention? What we really want to do is stop the condition from getting worse, before there are symptoms. So, what if there was a more efficient, effective, and affordable way to prevent disease? Can we bridge the gap between preventative and personalized medicine? We can with a pre-symptomic approach.

There is a slight difference between a preventative approach and a proactive/pre-symptomic approach that makes a huge difference. Preventive medicine aims to “prevent disaster at all costs”. A proactive approach is more elegant, it aims to “anticipate, track, and treat”.

Proactive efforts are specific, individual, and targeted. Not only can it be more affordable, but it can lead to more consistent and improved patient outcomes.

Historically, tracking individual patients has been difficult. There are too many data points for a single human to understand. But with the advent of sophisticated artificial intelligence platforms, this difficulty is rapidly disappearing. And this data can lead to enormous cost savings and reliable results.

Proactive medicine improves results with careful attention to the individual and predicting future complications. Rather than following a fixed model of disease, or reacting to a perceived disorder, we use data to help patients in a personalized, anticipatory, way. We create a feed-forward loop, where we predict and track disease progression for the patient, and adapt our strategy along the way.

This builds a therapeutic alliance between the patient and care provider. Trust alone has shown to be a significant driver for positive outcomes.

There is great potential here to dramatically improve the quality of life for humans worldwide. And so, with my partners, we’ve decided to launch Vistim – a company that aims to predict and prevent neurological disease using proactive intelligence. We will start by solving the biggest problem: being able to know when a neurotherapy is working. Not by looking at symptoms, but by looking deeper - so symptoms can be eliminated and forever avoided.

Vistim lives at the intersection of cognition and perception. It’s designed to predict symptoms of neurodegeneration before it appears and measure cognitive decline. Treatments for these diseases are in development, but they’re unable to answer one critical question: how can you design a treatment when you don’t know if or when it’ll work? This question is central to Vistim's strategy.

We need a tool to measure the efficacy of treatment. With Vistim, it doesn't have to be a guessing game. We can show what does and doesn't work, and we can help researchers understand why.

Therapies for neurodegenerative diseases are coming. Some might already be here. There's just one piece missing – a shift to proactive medicine with effective, measurable, and affordable outcomes.

Vistim has made significant progress already. We’ve had success in clinical trials at Columbia University (USA) and LMU Munich (Germany). There, we were able to predict amyloid levels in the brain (biomarkers of Alzheimer’s disease and dementia) and show correlations between our methods and cognitive assessments.

We are planning additional trials to validate our results. If you are working in patient care, disease intervention, or researching neurodegenerative diseases, you’re invited to collaborate with Vistim and use our technology to predict symptomatic decline. We would love to partner with you to accelerate innovation and discovery for you and for us. If you are interested, please email me today at james@vistimlabs.com