Digital Biomarkers & Wearables

To prove that a CMT therapy works, researchers have to measure change, and the traditional ways of measuring CMT are coarse, subjective, and confined to the clinic. HNF is investing in digital and wearable measures that capture how the disease affects people objectively, sensitively, and in the real world, so the next generation of CMT trials can detect benefit that older tools would miss.

The gap is easy to describe. CMT changes slowly, and a clinician scoring strength or balance twice a year is taking two snapshots of a life that is lived every day in between. Two examiners can score the same person differently, and a person having a good hour in a clinic looks nothing like the same person at the end of a long day. That noise is not a minor inconvenience: it is what forces trials to be larger, longer, and more expensive than the science requires, and it can bury a real treatment effect under measurement error.

A sensor worn during ordinary life closes that gap. It records how far someone actually walks, how steadily, and how that holds up as fatigue sets in, continuously and without anyone scoring anything. HNF develops these measures with BioSensics and takes them to the FDA deliberately, because an outcome measure only helps patients once regulators accept it as evidence.