By Clinical Research News Staff

October 13, 2026 | The neurology care gap is no longer a slow-moving problem we can tolerate, because new treatments and clinical trial options for Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, ALS, and related dementias are arriving faster than the system can deliver access. When specialist wait times stretch eight to nine months, families default to primary care alone, even as decisions get more complex around biomarkers, safety monitoring, and emerging therapies like amyloid targeting treatments. This episode of the Scope of Things podcast shares a conversation between Michelle Snyder of McKesson and Synapticure CEO Sandra Abravaya as they follow Abravaya’s path from public service to healthcare entrepreneurship, grounded in a caregiver’s view of what happens when guidance is unavailable at the moment it matters most.

That urgency became personal when Abravaya’s husband was diagnosed with ALS, including the surreal “six months left” warning and the immediate scramble to preserve memories for two small children. Out of that shock came a shift from advocacy to building infrastructure. Sandra and her husband helped launch I AM ALS and pushed for federal funding, FDA regulatory flexibility, and programs like expanded access so patients who are too progressed for traditional enrollment can still receive investigational options while generating real-world evidence. The policy work also revealed a recurring clinical research pattern: promising therapies can fail when trials are not targeted enough from the outset.

Synapticure’s core thesis connects access to care with better clinical trial design. On the care side, the company operates a virtual neurology clinic that functions like a center of excellence, pairing subspecialty neurologists with care coordinators and behavioral health support. Telehealth neurology is positioned not as a convenience feature but as a way to reach rural care deserts, reduce travel burden, and bring the right people into the visit, including distant family members. The focus is on expert guidance: interpreting symptoms and progression, reviewing treatment options, and helping patients understand clinical trials without losing details in translation.

On the cures side, the model creates longitudinal, de-identified patient data that life sciences companies often cannot assemble at scale. That includes potential control group datasets, patient journey analytics, adherence signals, and clinically meaningful segmentation such as phenotype, onset pattern, respiratory scores, genetics, and biomarkers. With richer front-end data, sponsors can design targeted neurology clinical trials that have a better chance of meeting primary endpoints, avoiding the painful scenario where a drug helps a subset but fails overall. Synapticure also describes functioning as a virtual trial site, improving enrollment speed and expanding geographic and socioeconomic diversity.

The episode also highlights how dementia care has become a major growth engine through participation in the CMS CMMI GUIDE model, with an emphasis on reducing caregiver burden. Reported outcomes include fewer all-cause and emergency department admissions, fewer inpatient rehab days, and delayed transitions to long-term care, framed as the payoff of a high-touch approach. Scaling that model requires operational discipline: standard visit lengths, follow-up cadence, referral workflows, and constant attention to provider supply versus demand. The takeaway is pragmatic and hopeful: virtual care can raise quality, strengthen research, and give families faster answers when time is the most limited resource.

For the full conversation, listen to the latest episode of The Scope of Things Podcast.