Cx Precision Medicine: A Simple Blood Test That Brings Early Alzheimer’s Screening Into Primary Care
StartUp Health community members Sid O’Bryant, PhD, and Danguole Altman of Cx Precision Medicine are building a simple blood test for primary care to rule out cognitive impairment sooner and spare families months of uncertainty. Using inflammation, vascular, and metabolic markers, the test aims to curb unnecessary referrals and guide at-risk patients to timely, targeted care.
When a loved one begins to forget appointments or misplace the familiar, families enter a maze. Appointments stack up, referrals take months, and answers feel far away. That experience shaped the career of Sid O’Bryant, PhD, a neuropsychologist who watched his own grandmother wait more than a year and spend thousands of dollars to get clarity. It also drew seasoned health leader Danguole Altman to partner with him and translate years of laboratory research into a practical tool for the front lines of care.
Cx Precision Medicine, a member of StartUp Health’s Alzheimer’s Moonshot Community, is building that tool: a first-line blood test designed to help primary care physicians quickly rule out cognitive dysfunction. The aim is straightforward, reduce unnecessary specialty referrals, spare patients from long and stressful workups, and make sure the right people reach neurology and memory clinics sooner.
Why Primary Care Needs Help Now
The numbers tell the story. In the United States, roughly 73 million people are over 65. An estimated 10 to 20 percent live with mild cognitive impairment, which can be a precursor to Alzheimer’s. Yet the average primary care visit lasts about 14 minutes, and many physicians do not perform any cognitive testing during that time. The current path to a diagnosis often requires a comprehensive cognitive assessment, MRI, blood work to rule out other conditions, and sometimes confirmatory tests like lumbar puncture or amyloid PET. It is thorough, it is also slow, costly, and hard to access.
That is where a reliable, first-line screen can change the trajectory. If a quick blood test can tell a primary care doctor that a worried patient is very unlikely to have cognitive impairment, care can stay local, stress can come down, and the clinician can focus on other causes such as depression, diabetes, sleep problems, or hearing loss. If the test suggests genuine concern, the patient moves up the pathway for deeper evaluation without losing time.
What Makes This Test Different
Many headlines in Alzheimer’s research focus on amyloid. Those therapies and diagnostics matter, particularly when used early, but an amyloid-only lens can miss people or create false alarms. Some cognitively normal older adults have amyloid and never develop dementia, while a meaningful subset of patients, especially in diverse populations, have little amyloid pathology even when symptoms are real.
Cx Precision Medicine takes a broader clinical view. The blood test is trained on clinical diagnosis rather than amyloid status and draws on a panel of biomarkers that reflect inflammation, vascular dysfunction, and metabolic dysfunction. In practice, that means the test is tuned to answer a real-world question in the exam room: Does this patient look like someone with cognitive impairment who needs further workup or can we safely rule that out today and address other issues? In early feedback from physicians and payers, an estimated eight in ten patients are expected to receive a rule-out result, which keeps care with the primary team and reduces pressure on specialty clinics that are already at capacity.
Built for Impact in the Exam Room
For primary care, the appeal is obvious. The test does not add minutes to a jammed schedule, it offers a fast triage signal that is easy to act on. For payers and health systems, it offers a path to reduce unnecessary imaging, specialty visits, and inappropriate use of costly new drugs with serious side-effect considerations. For patients and families, it replaces months of uncertainty with a clear next step.
Altman brings deep operating experience across clinics, payers, and provider organizations, so the team is building not only for scientific rigor but also for workflow fit. The company is finalizing validation as a lab developed test and preparing pilot programs with physician groups to refine logistics such as sample collection, ordering, and reporting. The north star is simple, put a practical, evidence-based screen into the places where most people first voice a memory concern.
A Field at an Inflection Point
In a recent chat with us, both leaders describe a moment of rapid evolution. Disease-modifying drugs are arriving, lifestyle and risk-modifying interventions are gaining traction, and the research community is widening its lens to reflect the diversity of real patients. Getting the right person to the right intervention at the right time requires better triage. That is the role Cx Precision Medicine is stepping in to play, a pragmatic bridge between the science of biomarkers and the reality of a busy clinic.
For O’Bryant, the mission remains personal. Every incremental improvement means fewer families trapped in limbo and more patients receiving targeted care sooner. For Altman, it is about relieving system strain while raising the standard of care. For our Alzheimer’s Moonshot, it is about accelerating solutions that shift detection earlier and make precision health possible for everyone, not only those who live near a top memory center.
If early detection is the doorway to better outcomes, primary care needs the key. Cx Precision Medicine, a StartUp Health community member, is working to put that key in every clinician’s hands.
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Published: Sep 9, 2025
Produced by Nicole Kinsey
