Voxeleron announces joint development agreement with Johns Hopkins

Voxeleron are pleased to announce their inter-institutional agreement with Johns Hopkins University to jointly develop automated methods to count corneal subbasal nerves.  Based on an initial collaboration that demonstrated how corneal nerve assessment has the potential to diagnose and monitor peripheral neuropathy, this new effort aims to take the research into the clinic using existing confocal microscopy devices.

The cornea is the densest sensory innervation of the body.  Quantitative measures of corneal density can measure HIV-induced peripheral neuropathies without the need to use skin biopsies to diagnose and manage such diseases.  In addition, another key clinical driver is chemotherapy-induced peripheral neuropathy, a common adverse effect of anticancer drugs and treatment.  The patent-pending methods invented by Voxeleron and JHU are based on image data acquired non-invasively using a clinical confocal microscope and will be further developed under this agreement.

The work will be lead by Professor Joseph Mankowski at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and Jonathan Oakley, Ph.D., principal scientist at Voxeleron LLC.  This collaboration couples Johns Hopkins’ profound clinical expertise with Voxeleron’s state of the art computer vision and machine learning algorithms.

More information regarding the initial work can be found here; more information regarding Voxeleron can be found here.