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Cumulus Neuroscience Unveils New Digital Task at AAIC 2026

Cumulus Neuroscience, a leader in digital health solutions, presented pivotal research findings at the Alzheimer's Association International Conference (AAIC) 2026, revealing groundbreaking results from their two-minute cognitive task named "Symbol Swap." This task, conducted on the NeuLogiq® platform, demonstrates its capability to match or even exceed the performance of traditional clinical benchmarks used in the pre-screening of Alzheimer’s trial participants.

During the presentation, titled "A Brief Digital Coding Task Surpasses Clinical Benchmarks for Alzheimer’s Clinical Trial Pre-Screening," Cumulus reported findings from three distinct studies that highlight the efficacy and efficiency of Symbol Swap. The results indicate that this digital task effectively distinguishes between healthy controls, individuals with mild cognitive impairment (MCI), and those with Alzheimer’s dementia, creating a significant clinical differentiation in just two minutes. This is a notable advancement considering traditional cognitive assessments often take significantly longer to administer.

The Symbol Swap task not only matched the established cognitive screening tools such as ADAS-Cog, MoCA, and MMSE, but it also identified underlying pathologies indicated by blood biomarkers, including pTau-217, in individuals who clinically appeared normal. This suggests that the tool could play a critical role in identifying individuals at risk for Alzheimer’s before more invasive biomarker testing, thus enhancing the efficiency of downstream screenings, whether they be plasma-based, PET scans, or CSF analyses.

"It’s striking to see that a two-minute task, which is easy for patients to perform, can equate to or outperform assessments that require 10 to 45 minutes by a qualified clinician, and can detect Alzheimer’s pathology even in participants who seem cognitively normal during standard tests," stated Dr. Brian Murphy, co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer of Cumulus Neuroscience.

Dr. Murphy emphasized the potential of Symbol Swap as an excellent first-line screening tool, paving the way for improved recruitment strategies in clinical trials and reducing the burden on participants and study sites alike. This approach not only streamlines the participant selection process but also enhances overall trial efficiency.

The Symbol Swap tool was evaluated through the CNS-101 study, a pioneering validation project that used NeuLogiq to measure functional neurophysiology in patients with mild Alzheimer’s dementia vs. healthy controls (compared to ADAS-Cog), as well as in the clinical Fastball i4i study (compared to MoCA) and the BioHermes-002 study by the Global Alzheimer's Platform (GAP) across 20 sites in the U.S., Canada, and Europe (compared to MMSE).

In these studies, pathology status was determined using the AlzPath test for phosphorylated tau protein level at position 217. Data were also shared from the ongoing Bio-Hermes-002 study, which aims to recruit participants regardless of their memory status to assess the likelihood of detecting Alzheimer’s-related biomarkers, thus improving participant selection in follow-up studies.

In addition to Symbol Swap, Dr. James Rowe, a leading researcher at the University of Cambridge, presented a second poster outlining the effectiveness of NeuLogiq’s multidomain digital assessments. His findings confirmed that cognitive evaluations and EEG measurements using the NeuLogiq platform are not only well-tolerated by Alzheimer’s patients but also sensitive enough to enact meaningful change in smaller and more efficient clinical trials.

Dr. Rowe noted, "Clinical trials for Alzheimer's have long relied on assessments that are burdensome for participants and hard to implement at scale. Our research shows that multidomain digital cognitive and EEG measures are sensitive enough to detect significant changes, facilitating smaller, more manageable studies and easing the burden on patients."

Tina Sampath, CEO of Cumulus, remarked on the implications of these findings: "Recruiting the right participants for clinical trials remains one of the most costly and frustrating challenges in the development of Alzheimer’s treatments. A low-cost, patient-friendly test that can be administered at home or in clinical settings and identifies the most likely biomarker-positive individuals holds tremendous potential to reduce screening failure rates and lessen the burden on participants and screening centers."

Cumulus Neuroscience continues to lead the way in improving clinical trial accuracy and efficiency in central nervous system studies, enabling remote patient monitoring across various areas of brain function. For more information about their contributions to neuroscience, visit Cumulus Neuroscience.

About Cumulus Neuroscience

Cumulus Neuroscience is dedicated to generating essential data and insights to accelerate the diagnosis and management of central nervous system disorders for millions of patients and caregivers worldwide. The company develops NeuLogiq®, a multidomain digital biomarker platform powered by artificial intelligence to enable faster, more effective decision-making in neurology and neuropsychiatry clinical trials and patient care. Designed collaboratively with ten of the largest pharmaceutical companies globally, this platform supports decentralized clinical trials and significantly contributes to the development of treatments for Alzheimer’s disease, depression, and schizophrenia.