Global Kinetics Corporation (GKC) has announced it recently received Notice of Allowance for US patent application 12/997540 covering the company’s lead product, the Personal KinetiGraph.
The patent application covers the objective measurement of bradykinesia. Bradykinesia, or slowness of movement, is one of the most common symptoms and a defining feature of Parkinson’s disease. The capacity to continuously measure this movement symptom underpins the company's PKG system.
“The allowance of this application supports GKC’s continued progress in the commercialisation of our novel, US FDA-cleared PKG system, which is being used to support the management of Parkinson’s disease in over 215 clinics in 16 countries around the world,” said GKC’s global head of business development and legal affairs, Michelle Goldsmith. “We are aggressively pursuing clinical and commercial milestones that will ultimately enable us to make measurable change in the lives of people with Parkinson’s.”
The PKG system, developed by Professor Malcolm Horne and Dr Rob Griffiths at Melbourne’s Howard Florey Institute and Monash University, incorporates a wrist-worn device to record body movements over several days as people go about their daily lives.
Inaccurate assessment of Parkinson’s symptoms may result in patients experiencing uncontrolled symptoms, reducing their quality of life and increasing healthcare costs.
The company said, by adding the PKG system into a patient’s routine care, treating clinicians have a tool that assists them to augment their clinical assessment with GKC’s proprietary objective data, captured by the PKG watch over seven days.
“GKC has long held the view that measurement is key to optimal management in Parkinson’s. Our algorithms underpin GKC’s ability to provide clinically meaningful and actionable information about Parkinson’s symptoms to clinicians,” explained Professor Horne, GKC’s co-founder and chief scientific officer.
The results of a recent study show the PKG system detected 85 per cent of Parkinson’s patients previously considered 'controlled' by their treating physician were, in fact, uncontrolled and experiencing treatable symptoms.
The study also showed that, without the PKG, one third of the patients that the PKG system detected as having treatable symptoms would have been missed by expert movement disorder specialists (MDS).
"When patients, who were classified as uncontrolled, were treated per their physicians’ recommendations, their outcomes improved, including the subgroup where only the PKG, not the MDS, detected the need for treatment changes," said the company.