The Scottsdale company behind the Syn-One skin test now has a dedicated neurodiagnostics lab to build whatever comes after it.
On 17 September, a ribbon was cut in Scottsdale, Arizona, in front of a laboratory that wasn’t yet doing any work. CND Life Sciences says its new Innovation Laboratory will begin operations the week after that ceremony, which employees, community members, and key stakeholders attended [1].
If the name CND rings no bell, the company is best known for the Syn-One Test, a skin-based test that helps clinicians determine whether someone with symptoms might have a Parkinson’s-related disease. The new lab is a separate space from the clinical laboratory where patient samples are processed. CND says it will host assay development (that’s the design of new lab tests), biomarker research, technology evaluation and translational research, which means taking findings from the bench and pushing them toward clinical use.
A lab that sits apart from the daily grind
That separation is the interesting design choice. CND’s existing clinical lab is CLIA-certified, CAP-accredited and CLEP-permitted, which are the credentials attached to its patient-testing work. That kind of work needs to run the same way every day, and research rarely does. Giving the experiments their own space keeps a half-finished idea out of the way of a test result someone is waiting for.
The new lab is near the company’s headquarters and central laboratory operations, which lets scientific, product development, operational and leadership teams work close together. CND also describes it as an investment in Arizona’s growing biotechnology and medical technology community.
The company frames the whole thing as a growth move. It says the lab supports long-term growth through priority research, innovation and product-development programs, and gives it the talent and infrastructure for its next phase. That’s a fairly standard way to talk about a new facility. The more telling detail is that CND lists assay development and technology evaluation, which suggests the plan includes improving what it already sells as well as inventing new things.
“The opening of our Innovation Laboratory marks an important milestone for CND,” said Dr Todd Levine, CND’s Chief Medical Officer and co-founder. “This facility reflects our commitment to investing in our people, scientific capabilities and long-term vision, helping us better serve clinicians, patients, researchers and partners.”
The company’s science chief looked further ahead and mentioned treatments.
“The Innovation Laboratory strengthens our ability to explore new scientific opportunities, advance the future of precision neurodiagnostic medicine, and support development of novel therapeutic treatments for degenerative diseases,” said Dr Christopher Gibbons, Chief Scientific Officer and co-founder. “By creating a focused environment for scientific expansion, the facility will help us move promising ideas forward and continue building on the work that drives our mission.”
The test it grew out of
Syn-One looks for a protein called phosphorylated alpha-synuclein in the tiny nerves of the skin. In diseases like Parkinson’s, dementia with Lewy bodies and multiple system atrophy, this protein builds up abnormally, and the test also measures other signs of nerve damage in the periphery. Checking skin for clues about a brain disease sounds a bit odd, but it means the sample comes from somewhere a clinician can reach.
CND points to a 2024 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), which was NIH-sponsored, prospective and multicenter. In it, the protein was found in 95.5% of participants who had been clinically diagnosed with one of these diseases. That figure tells you how often the test picked up the protein in people who already had a diagnosis. The company’s release doesn’t say how the test performs in people without the disease, so treat it as one piece of the picture.
CND says more than 3,500 clinicians have used Syn-One in the diagnostic evaluation of more than 70,000 patients.
Where aging comes in
Neurodegeneration is one of the places where longer lives and better lives can pull apart. People are living long enough to meet these diseases, and by the time symptoms are obvious, a lot of damage may already be done. That’s the logic behind catching them sooner, and it’s why the small print in CND’s release deserves attention. The company says it collaborates with biopharmaceutical companies on clinical trials of investigational therapies, and that it is conducting studies on early disease detection and synuclein quantification.
Quantification could turn out to be the important word. Spotting a protein is a yes-or-no question, while measuring how much of it is there might give trial teams another way to track whether a treatment is doing anything. That part is speculation, and CND hasn’t said it’s the plan. But it’s the kind of tool an innovation lab would be well placed to build.
It’s also a little unusual to hear a diagnostics company talk about therapies in the same breath. In Gibbons’s quote, the lab supports the development of novel therapeutic treatments for degenerative diseases, which fits with CND’s existing work alongside drug developers. Tests and treatments tend to grow up together in this field, since a trial needs a reliable way to find and follow the right patients.
What we don’t know is a fair amount. The release gives no figure for what the facility cost, no headcount and no list of first projects. For now, this is a company announcing that it has room to think, with the results still to come.
