Hideki Garren, MD, PhD: Measuring MS Progression With Floodlight Open

“Patients don’t have to wait for visits to their doctor’s office every 6 months or every 3 months. We can look for progression in these patients.”

As part of the mixture between the desire to collect quality data for physicians and the efforts of an ongoing open access trial, Genentech has developed an app to collect information about patients with MS to improve physician insight.

At the 34th Congress of the European Committee for Treatment and Research in Multiple Sclerosis (ECTRIMS) in Berlin, Germany, Hideki Garren, MD, PhD, the Global Head of Neuroimmunology at Genentech, spoke with NeurologyLive about this development, and the plans for the larger, ongoing trial.

An original proof-of-concept trial to assess the tool’s capability showed a high rate of adherence and satisfaction with the tool. The application, which is downloadable on a smartphone, is used to asses both passive and active measures of disease progression. This allows both the patients and physicians to access the information about the clinical status of their disease.

Currently, the program is initiating an open-access trial, called FLOODLIGHT OPEN, which is open for any patient in the United States and Canada—whether or not they have MS—to join, with an ultimate goal of gathering data on 5000 patients in the next decade.