TED Fellows Call on Parkinson’s Patients to Help Screen, Monitor Disease Progression
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — December 3, 2012 —Today, Paul Wicks Ph.D., director of research for PatientsLikeMe, and Max Little, Ph.D., founder of the Parkinson’s Voice Initiative (PVI), kick off a partnership to advance Parkinson’s disease (PD) research through the sound of the patient voice. The two TED Fellows, whose collaboration was recently highlighted on CNN’s “The Next List with Dr. Sanjay Gupta,” are calling on PatientsLikeMe members to record their voices and update their own health profiles to keep track of their disease status.
PatientsLikeMe and PVI have joined forces to further validate Dr. Little’s discovery that the voice can be used as a biomarker for disease progression. Dr. Wicks says, “If Max’s work proves out, this could mean that the cell phones we all carry may be the key to the best biomarker for Parkinson’s disease. The project could also lead the way in lowering the cost and accelerating the discovery of the next generation of treatments. It’s an honor to collaborate with Max and our patients on such transformative work.”
PD is a progressive disorder of the nervous system affecting 6.3 million people worldwide. In a recent TED talk, Dr. Little explains it’s expensive and time consuming to detect the disease early on, and nearly impossible to objectively measure the disease’s progression outside of clinical trials. Through a simple phone call, Dr. Little is testing if the tremors in a voice can be used to diagnose, measure and even assess the effectiveness of PD treatments.
Dr. Little adds, “Voluntary patient registries like the one Jamie Heywood and his team have pioneered are becoming crucial for researchers like me to accelerate and transform discovery. Our work with PatientsLikeMe will help us further validate our research by giving PVI access to more people, and more information, in real time.”
PVI has combined a digital microphone, precise voice analysis software and the latest advances in machine learning to create an unconventional method for automatically screening and monitoring PD. To learn more about the PVI and PatientsLikeMe, visit www.patientslikeme.com/join/pvi.
About PatientsLikeMe
PatientsLikeMe is a patient network that helps improve lives and a real-time research platform that advances medicine. Through the network, patients connect with others who have the same disease or condition and track and share their own experiences. In the process, they generate data about the real-world nature of disease that help researchers, pharmaceutical companies, regulators, providers and nonprofits develop more effective products, services and care. PatientsLikeMe has become a trusted source for real-world disease information and a clinically robust resource that has published more than 25 peer-reviewed research studies. Visit us at www.patientslikeme.com or follow us via our blog, Twitter or Facebook.
