Your saliva contains a roadmap
to your brain health.
In every drop of saliva, fragments of dying cells drift past — each one carrying a molecular signature of where it came from. We read those signatures.
A double helix,
six feet of code.
Every nucleus holds two meters of DNA — a spiraling ladder of A, T, C, G that encodes how a cell looks, behaves, and ultimately, how it dies.
Identical in every cell of your body — and yet no two cells play the same role.
A second code,
written on top.
At millions of positions along the strand, tiny methyl tags (—CH₃) are clipped onto the cytosines. This layer of chemistry silences genes — and its pattern is unique to every cell type.
What's unmethylated
is what the cell does.
The exposed, open regions of the strand are where the cell actively reads its instructions. In a neuron, the genes for synapses and axons stay open. In a hepatocyte, the metabolism genes do.
Read the open regions, and you can read the cell's profession.
When a cell dies,
its DNA shatters.
Nucleases clip the strand between nucleosomes, releasing ~167-base-pair fragments into saliva. The methylation marks survive intact — the cell's identity is preserved in the debris.
The fragments
remember who they were.
We sequence millions of fragments from a single saliva sample and compare their methylation patterns to an atlas of 450+ cell types. A neuron's methylation signature looks nothing like a muscle cell's — even in pieces.
▲ 3.4× elevated brain-origin cfDNA vs. baseline.
Every fragment
maps to a region.
Brain cells aren't uniform. A hippocampal pyramidal cell carries a different methylation fingerprint than a cortical interneuron or a cerebellar Purkinje cell. Each region leaves its own signature in saliva.
Which cells are dying
tells us which dementia.
Each neurodegenerative disease has a signature pattern of which neurons die first. By measuring the mix of brain-origin cfDNA, we distinguish the subtypes — years before symptoms converge.
CerebralScore outperforms
more invasive tests.
CerebralScore™ outperforms all other biomarkers and is able to classify symptomatic and dementia-diagnosed patients from healthy, asymptomatic individuals.
1 in 4 dementias
is misdiagnosed.
Symptoms converge before pathology does. By the time a clinical diagnosis is made, the underlying disease has often been progressing for years — and a substantial fraction of patients are assigned the wrong subtype, or no subtype at all.
are inaccurate at autopsy
or revised diagnosis
CerebralScore reads molecular signatures before symptoms converge — distinguishing subtypes from a single saliva sample, while there is still time to act.
Be among the first
to read your own signal.
CerebralScore is rolling out to a small cohort of beta users in the U.S. — adults curious about cognitive wellness who want to track the methylation patterns shed in their own saliva. Spots are limited.