Medical company CorTechs Labs Inc said on Thursday that it will now proceed with the second phase of its project titled 'Diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease and prediction of clinical progression using an automated PET image analysis tool'.

Funded by a USD1.15m, multi-year grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the project was awarded to CorTechs Labs in December 2018.

Under the first phase, the company worked on delivery methods using an automated PET image analysis tool to determine a patient's risk of developing Alzheimer's and to monitor disease progression and treatment response. Its PETQuant is now proven to be clinically and commercially viable.

In the second phase, the company is developing an automatic classification algorithm with the goal of separating Alzheimer's disease patients from non-Alzheimer's disease controls. It will assess if the algorithm can predict the risk of developing the disease in individuals.

Additionally, the company is establishing normative values to effectively identify scans that stray from the typical population. This entails carefully examining the degree of cortical binding of amyloid agents so that physicians can distinguish Alzheimer's disease from diseases with similar manifestations, including Lewy body dementia or cerebral amyloid angiopathy.

Alzheimer's disease is the sixth leading cause of death in the US. The Alzheimer's Association states that Alzheimer's is a progressive disease, where dementia symptoms gradually worsen over a number of years.