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Anthony Giovinazzo, chief executive of Cynapsus, said the Fox Foundation is helping the company recruit participants for the study, and that the partnership should be seen as a vote of confidence in the company, since it could have chosen from hundreds of others.

“We’d like to be doing things that will help further the improvement of a patient’s life, like our drug will hopefully do,” Giovinazzo said. “This work with Intel and the Michael J. Fox Foundation is an extension of that.”

Intel and the Fox Foundation have been working together to test smartwatches’ ability to gather useful data about Parkinson’s patients since 2014. They won’t reveal the brand of devices they’re testing, but they’re hoping they can prove smartwatches can provide clinically reliable data that’s more accurate and objective than a patient’s journals or a doctor’s observations.

Sohini Chowdhury, senior vice president of research partnerships at the Fox Foundation, said she believes the devices are up to the task. But the foundation needs to convince regulators as well, which is why they’re putting them to the test in the Cynapsus clinical trial.

“Technology really provides us with an opportunity, without adding a lot of burden to trial participants, of getting data that is objective and that is continuous over large amounts of time,” Chowdhury said. “They may not be making any diaries, they may be sleeping at night, but we’re still capturing information. You can see the potential of that really accelerating things, allowing us to get results in a much quicker fashion.”

Samir Devani, an analyst with UK-based Rx Securities who covers Cynapsus, said the partnership is part of a broader trend of technology teaming up with health care. He said the drug Cynapsus is developing has a lot of potential to improve the lives of Parkinson’s patients – and, if approved, the potential to make investors a lot of money.

“We’re quite optimistic, as a firm, that this drug will reach the market and be quite valuable to patients,” Devani said. “I think it’s got a lot of legs.”

cbrownell@postmedia.com

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