Ameya Kharade, a sophomore at Nashua High School South, and the innovator of CLIMB, with Deborah Schuh, New Hampshire director of the Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair. Courtesy photo

NASHUA – At just 16 years old, Ameya Kharade, a sophomore at Nashua High School South, has developed a remarkable new way of detecting Alzheimer’s disease early enough to give patients another chance at life.

On May 16, Regeneron and Society for Science announced that Kharade was one of the winners of the Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair for his project, Novel Brain Aging Analysis With CLIMB. In addition to his first place finish, Kharade also received $6,000.

Developed using artificial intelligence, Kharade said his Connectivity-based Learning with Iterative Multistage Brain analysis is capable of looking at a brain scan to determine how old that particular brain acts.

“Not your birthday age, your brain age,” he said. “That matters because in Alzheimer’s, your brain can start breaking down decades before memory loss starts. Right now, Alzheimer’s is usually diagnosed after symptoms like memory loss begin. By then, the brain has already been deteriorating for 15-30 years. So I built a model that can flag signs of early brain aging before symptoms, giving doctors time to actually do something.”

Using CLIMB, Kharade said Alzheimer’s can be detected up to 30 years before the onset of memory loss. CLIMB is also able to show which parts of the brain have the greatest age progression.

Having been used in more than 1,400 brain scans, CLIMB has proven to be 58 percent more accurate than the current detection tools. This reduces the margin of error by more than six years. In addition, CLIMB can predict a person’s biological sex with 93 percent accuracy.

“What’s exciting is where this can go, imagine doctors using this as a brain health check-up years before any symptoms. That could change the future of Alzheimer’s and other brain diseases,” said Kharade. “I want to keep building smarter tools that help us understand the brain and maybe even personalize treatment someday. There’s so much we still don’t see in neurology and I want to be part of changing that.”