What

The same electrophysiology Alto ran in people, run in rats. The compound was administered to animals and ERPs were collected through a contract research organisation; the question was which signals survive the species jump, and therefore which preclinical evidence can legitimately inform a human trial.

Why it mattered

A translational biomarker is what lets a preclinical result mean something for dose and endpoint selection in people. If a measure like theta inter-trial coherence behaves the same way in a rodent and in a patient, an animal study can de-risk a human one. If it doesn’t, the preclinical data is a separate story that happens to use the same vocabulary.

My role

Performed all of the analysis: preprocessing and ERP extraction from the rodent recordings, cross-species comparison of the features, effect sizes, and statistics.

Outcome

First author on the SOBP 2025 poster Translational utility of ERP and time-frequency features for cognitive impairment in schizophrenia: preclinical evaluation of MK-801 deficits and rescue by ALTO-101, which reported that the NMDA antagonist MK-801 reduced theta inter-trial coherence dose-dependently and that ALTO-101 rescued it (d=0.73, p<0.001 at 0.1 mg/kg).