Inc. Magazine
Rune Labs, founded in 2018 by Brian Pepin, is transforming Parkinson’s care with its FDA-cleared StrivePD app, which tracks patient data via iPhone and Apple Watch. The platform helps personalise treatment, cut ER visits, and streamline clinical trials, while partnering with major health systems, foundations, and biopharma to accelerate new therapies.
How This Data-Thirsty Startup Is Taking on Parkinson’s Disease With an App
Author: Sy Mukherjee
When people ask Brian Pepin the inevitable question—“Why Parkinson’s?”—he has a simple answer: A disease that afflicts 1.1 million Americans with 90,000 new diagnoses every year is a logical starting point for transforming how we treat and make drugs for other brain diseases.
The more comprehensive reply lies in the strategy Pepin’s seven-year-old startup, the brain data collection and analytics firm Rune Labs, has successfully deployed over the past six years in the Parkinson’s disease ecosystem.
In health care, the medical data continuum isn’t so much a straight line as it is an intricate web of players using information to make informed decisions. Rune’s central offering, its StrivePD app, takes a multipronged approach that touches several of them by serving as a data nexus point for patients, care providers, health systems, nonprofits, and research organizations, and biopharmaceutical companies experimenting with new Parkinson’s treatments. Its reach even extends to regulators, shifting the way real-world, real-time data collected through smartphones and wearables can be used to streamline the drug development process.
Just how has Rune made such a noticeable impact since its 2018 founding? It helps that the 37-year-old Pepin has a formidable engineering and neuroscience background, including work on brain-machine interfaces and projects at Verily (now Google Life Sciences).
“Parkinson’s is a giant problem that needs to be solved. And all these lessons that we’re learning in Parkinson’s, this is the place to learn them and the time to learn them. And I think as new therapies do become hopefully available in Alzheimer’s and dementia and some other areas, I think we’d be looking to apply a lot of the same methodologies” as Rune already has in Parkinson’s, Pepin says.
Rune’s main offering is its StrivePD app, which is essentially a medical software as a service (SaaS) system—multiple services, in fact. It primarily functions as a real-time data collection and insights repository with Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-cleared iPhone and Apple Watch apps.
For Parkinson’s patients, the app works like this: It keeps tabs on crucial biometric and motor function, providing data that a doctor uses to make personalized clinical care decisions and recommendations. For instance, does a self-reported spike in irritability, or having more Parkinson’s-related tremors in the afternoon versus the evening, mean you should consider changing the timing or dosage of medication? Does data collected over weeks and months suggest a patient should strongly consider physical therapy?
These types of insights, gleaned from the StrivePD data, can prove invaluable for a disease like Parkinson’s, which wastes away both patients’ physical and cognitive abilities. That’s why the StrivePD app’s user input feature—the information that patients log themselves—is critical for care providers, supplementing the more cut-and-dry biometric and medication data it collects from a patient’s phone or smartwatch in real time.
“The intimate details are more of the nonphysical things; they’re the panic attacks from anxiety that people suffer from, they’re the acting out of dreams where they now they can’t sleep with their bed partner because they’re thrashing and kicking, and their bed partner doesn’t want to get punched,” says Amanda Hare, a nurse practitioner who works hands-on with Parkinson’s patients while serving as Rune’s medical science liaison.
This is the kind of information clinicians like Hare can get from the StrivePD reports, which Rune encourages patients to share with their care teams to help them make decisions tailored to individual patients. A patient who keeps suffering from extreme tremors because of steep spikes followed by steep drops in their dopamine levels (a hallmark of Parkinson’s, which is essentially a dopamine deficiency disease) might be advised to switch from dopamine-replenishing pills to a subcutaneous pump that dispenses the medicine gradually, for example.
The data-fueled approach is already paying dividends in health systems, according to Rune. In late 2024, the company unveiled research showing that its system had helped slash California Kaiser Permanente Parkinson’s patients’ ER visits by more than 40 percent, and that 90 percent of patients were exercising more.
But this mass of analytics has even broader value, especially as Rune’s Strive ecosystem collects years of data across thousands of patients, for designing clinical trials for the latest Parkinson’s therapies.
For instance, it can simplify the cumbersome process of clinical trial enrollment by matching patients who fit the criteria for ongoing drug trials with sites close to them and recruiting participants. Practically speaking, this can reduce the number of patients a trial needs to enroll by identifying those most likely to benefit from that specific trial.
More generally, Rune’s insights can further shape how biopharma companies working on new therapies, including cell and gene therapies, demonstrate that their treatments are working with a real-time dataset, according to Pepin.
“The reason I started this company when I did, in 2018, was because I was thinking, over the next decade, there’s going to be these new Parkinson’s therapies coming out, and there really needs to be a company who can help bridge the stuff that’s happening in the clinic to the real world and help figure out which patients should be on these therapies, help clinicians manage patients effectively on these therapies,” and more, he says.
In the past six years, Rune has forged partnerships with health care providers such as Kaiser Permanente and teamed up with marquee Parkinson’s groups like the Parkinson’s Foundation and the Michael J. Fox Foundation to advance research on different types of Parkinson’s patients. Biopharma companies like BlueRock Therapeutics, which is using Rune’s platform to study the disease in its experimental Parkinson’s stem cell therapy, and personalized cell therapy-focused biotech firm Aspen Neuroscience, have also partnered with Rune.
“I think we’ve earned some amount of trust and respect. And now we’re getting a chance to do some of those more ambitious things that will hopefully lead to real, meaningful new drug approvals,” says Pepin.
“Meaningful,” in this context, means disease-modifying—that is, creating treatments that fight the underlying disease and Parkinson’s root causes, rather than just its symptoms, with new biotechnologies like cell and gene therapy.
If Rune can keep showing its methodical, data-driven strategy is a winner for patients, health systems, and biopharma companies, it just might shift how the medical industry thinks about brain diseases in the first place.
Credits: TCA, LLC.