Last month, Solomon began enrolling patients in a large clinical trial that will test whether an experimental device built by Cambridge biotech Cognito Therapeutics can stall Alzheimer’s. About 500 patients at 50 sites around the country will get a headset to wear at home for an hour a day that uses light and sound frequencies to reset brainwaves.
The technique, known as gamma wave therapy, sounds like science fiction, or a scam, or just plain kooky. But it is based on research by MIT scientists, and the startup announced Wednesday that it’s raised $73 million to fund the clinical study required for federal regulators to greenlight the device.
“Most people still think this is an oddball, but we stand behind our due diligence,” said Helen H. Liang, founder and managing partner of FoundersX Fund Ventures, a technology-focused venture capital firm based in California and Cambridge that led Cognito’s new financing. “We are not high risk-takers. We think there is a strong science behind it.”
Cognito chief executive Brent Vaughan expects the new study to wrap up in 2025. Potentially, he said, the company could submit its device to the FDA and gain approval by the end of that year.
Gamma waves are a little-studied electrical signal that brain cells make when we are learning or concentrating. Although neuroscientists have long known that these brainwaves are sluggish or missing in people with Alzheimer’s, there were few efforts to do anything about it.
That changed in 2016 when a team led by MIT neuroscientists Li-Huei Tsai and Ed Boyden figured out how to trigger gamma waves in mice, first using a complex molecular technique known as optogenetics, and later with simple light and sound stimulation. To their amazement, the gamma waves cleared the mouse brains of sticky clumps of proteins called amyloid plaques, known to accumulate in Alzheimer’s patients.
“It was the most surprising result I’ve ever got in my life,” said Tsai, who is the director of the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT. “When we published our first paper, most people said, ‘I don’t believe it. This is too good to be true. How can something this simple have this kind of effect?’”
Tsai and Boyden cofounded Cognito to translate their bewildering results from mice into humans. The company launched the same day that their mice study was published in the prestigious scientific journal Nature in December 2016. Both scientists still serve as scientific advisors to the startup.
The company approached Solomon before the COVID pandemic to see if he would lead a small study assessing the safety of the approach, and whether patients would tolerate using a device that flickered light into their eye
