One of the greatest barriers to developing therapies for Charcot-Marie-Tooth (CMT) disease has been the lack of sensitive clinical endpoints capable of detecting meaningful disease progression over shorter trial durations.

The CMT Research Foundation has invested in a project with Dr. Wolfgang Pernice at Columbia University to validate DANCER (Digital Assessment of Natural Motion for Clinical Endpoint Research), an AI-powered platform that derives complete 3D whole-body motion data from simple smartphone videos. By capturing highly detailed gait and movement metrics outside specialized laboratory settings, DANCER has the potential to provide scalable, quantitative clinical outcome assessments suitable for use in CMT therapeutic trials. If validated, this approach could help remove critical roadblocks to clinical trial efficiency and accelerate therapy development across CMT subtypes.