CND and Syn-One Test® Featured as a Biomedical Breakthrough in NINDS’ 75th Anniversary Commemoration
The National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS), a division of the National Institute of Health (NIH), featured a story about CND Life Sciences and the development of the Syn-One Test as part of NINDS’ 75th anniversary celebration. Titled “A Breakthrough Beneath the Skin,” the piece underscores the importance of federal NIH funding and its role in hatching crucial medical innovations for patient care.
The NINDS story traces the history of CND, which began with a debate between CND co-founders Dr. Roy Freeman and Dr. Christopher Gibbons over an academic poster at a medical conference in 2008. As a faculty member of Harvard Medical School and leading neurologist and researcher at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) in Boston, Dr. Freeman received the first NINDS grant related to Syn-One over 15 years ago that allowed Dr. Gibbons and their joint research lab at BIDMC to prove a skin biopsy could be a reliable route to detect the pathological form of alpha-synuclein. After years of scientific development and collaboration with co-founder Dr. Todd Levine, the Syn-One Test has now been used as a diagnostic tool for more than 40,000 patients, with many tests performed by clinicians in locations where access to movement disorder and other neurological specialists is limited.
Grants from the NINDS were also integral to the establishment of CND as a company and to the research required to create and validate the Syn-One Test, beginning with a $3 million Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Program grant in 2020. “That first SBIR grant didn’t just fund our first real lab—it validated the entire technology,” said Dr. Todd Levine, CND’s Chief Medical Officer. NINDS awarded two additional SBIR grants to CND in 2022 to fund research on dementia with Lewy bodies and REM sleep behavior disorder.
Over the last five years, CND has grown from a small lab in Phoenix to a national neurodiagnostics company serving thousands of patients. The Syn-One Test continues to play a key role supporting neurologists and other clinicians in all 50 states in their efforts to make earlier, more precise diagnoses of Parkinson’s disease and related disorders thanks to support from NINDS. “Without that first NIH grant, none of this would have happened,” said Dr. Levine.
