This week on Life Sciences Today
I hosted Eddie Ben-Ami, founder and CEO of Neuralight on the podcast last week.
Neuralight is tackling one of neurology’s biggest problems: how crudely specialists measure disease progression in conditions like Parkinson’s, MS, ALS, and Huntington’s.
Despite MRI and gene sequencing, the current “gold standard” is still a neurologist’s subjective bedside exam – pushing patients to test balance, or asking caregivers how hard it is to adjust clothes in bed.
Founder & CEO Eddie Ben-Ami explains how Neuralight replaces this with a 10‑minute, tablet-based eye-movement test using a standard camera. By leveraging decades of visual-system research (largely from primate studies), they extract functional biomarkers tied to specific neural pathways and brain regions. The result: objective, quantitative measures of brain function that are highly sensitive to change over time.
Over the past four years, Neuralight has run large longitudinal studies on thousands of patients across multiple neurodegenerative diseases. In Parkinson’s, they’ve shown their metrics are 10x more sensitive to change than the existing clinical gold standard, with results being presented at ADPD in Copenhagen alongside the very inventors of that standard.
Commercially, Neuralight is already being paid as a per-test diagnostic in five pharma drug trials (Phase 1 and 2), where their measures serve as secondary/exploratory endpoints. Their moat is a growing, hard-to-replicate dataset linking eye movements to rich clinical data. Looking ahead to 2026, they’re focused on: successful readouts from ongoing trials, expanding into psychiatry, and bringing their technology into preventative-care platforms so even healthy people can track brain function—before catastrophe strikes.
The problem with neurology’s toolbox
Neurology is, in Eddie’s words, “kind of backward.” In a world of gene sequencing and advanced MRI, the main tools physicians use to track disease progression in Parkinson’s, ALS, MS, and Huntington’s are still bedside assessments and intuition.
Neurologists literally push patients to see how close they get to falling.
Drug trials ask patients how hard it is to adjust their clothes in bed.
These are the gold standards.
The gap between what technology can do and what medicine actually measures is staggering.
What Neuralight Built Instead
The visual system is the best-understood part of the brain — decades of primate research have mapped exactly which neural pathways govern eye movements and how they degrade in neurodegenerative disease. Neuralight turned that knowledge into a 10-minute, tablet-based eye-tracking test using a standard camera.
No invasive procedures. No specialist equipment. Just a dot on a screen, a camera, and some extraordinary engineering.
The output: objective, quantified biomarkers of brain function tied to specific neural pathways. Not a black-box AI correlation. A direct, clean measurement of what specific brain regions are actually doing.
The Validation-First Playbook
I asked Eddie, “What is your favorite anti-pattern in digital health?”
We’ll start with healthy volunteers, build a beautiful product, and figure out how to get into pharma.
Eddie argued the opposite is required to win in this space:
Start with hard clinical use cases and pharma trials, prove you can move the needle on real endpoints, and only then go “downstream” into broader wellness/preventative markets.
Here’s where most startups would have rushed to market. Neuralight spent four years doing the opposite — collecting data on thousands of patients across multiple diseases, following them for over a year, comparing their biomarkers to existing gold standards, and proving their measurements were sensitive to real clinical change.
The result? In Parkinson’s disease, Neuralight’s metrics are 10x more sensitive to change than the current gold standard. They’re presenting this data at ADPD in Copenhagen alongside the very scientists who invented that standard.
That validation opened every door. Neuralight is now live in 5 commercial pharma drug trials, being paid per test, with healthy margins and happy partners.
The Peter Thiel Principle
Dominate one small space. Then expand concentrically. Don’t try to boil the ocean.
Neuralight started with neurodegenerative disease. Now they’re moving into psychiatry and preventative care. The flywheel is spinning — more partnerships, more data, better capabilities.
The lesson for every founder in life sciences: patience isn’t weakness. In a conservative, high-stakes industry, validation is your moat, your credibility, and your only real shortcut.
Do the work first. Then scale.
Listen to the show with Eddie Ben-Ami on Life Sciences Today, part of the Healthcare IT Network.
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Great article!
(sorry not upgrading to the paid subscription..)
Great article!
(sorry not upgrading to the paid subscription..)