JANUARY 30, 2026
Abhishek (Abhi) Pratap, PhD
Executive Director, Global Clinical Development Lead
Boehringer Ingelheim
About the Presentation: Central nervous system (CNS) disorders impose an outsized burden of disability, yet therapeutic innovation has lagged behind other areas of medicine. A key reason is not only biological complexity and heterogeneity, but a persistent measurement and implementation gap: many CNS trials still depend on episodic, subjective clinician-, rater-, or patient-reported assessments that incompletely capture what patients and families value most—day-to-day functioning, participation, stability, and quality of life. This impacts sensitivity of detecting change, inflates variability, complicates patient selection and endpoint determination, and contributes to expensive trials that often fail to detect clinically meaningful benefit. CNS studies also face practical barriers including high dropout, limited representativeness, and poor generalizability from controlled trial settings to real-world life.
Innovative digital health technologies are increasingly necessary to close this gap through ecologically valid measurement of behavior and functioning, capturing domains that traditional instruments assess only indirectly or intermittently—activity, sleep, social rhythms, cognition, and routine. By shifting from “snapshot” clinic visits to longitudinal, within-person trajectories, digital measures can improve signal detection, characterize heterogeneity, and identify meaningful change earlier and with lower participant burden.
Digital approaches can also extend beyond measurement. The same platforms can deliver scalable, personalized adaptations of evidence-based psychosocial interventions, expand access to care, and support ongoing monitoring between visits—addressing barriers related to geography, stigma, and workforce constraints.
In this talk, I will highlight case examples from emerging CNS clinical studies demonstrating how digital health can (1) create more patient-relevant endpoints, (2) improve trial efficiency and interpretability, and (3) bridge research and care by enabling measurement and intervention in real-world settings. Together, these advances position digital health as a critical enabler of patient-centered CNS innovation—helping answer not only whether treatments work, but for whom, under what conditions, and with what durable impact.
About the Presenter: Dr. Abhishek (Abhi) Pratap is the Executive Director, Global Clinical Development Lead at Boehringer Ingelheim, where he directs clinical development for digital therapeutics and innovative measurement approaches. With more than 15 years of experience spanning academia and biopharma, he specializes in translating real-world data and digital technologies into patient-centered, regulatory-aligned evidence for CNS disorders.
Dr. Pratap recently led a pivotal Phase III trial in schizophrenia (NCT05838625), the first confirmatory study to demonstrate improvement in negative symptoms—marking a significant milestone for the first effective, scalable & safe intervention helping patients overcome negative defeatist beliefs.
Prior to Boehringer, Dr. Pratap served as Head of Data Innovation at Biogen Digital Health, where he oversaw the execution of Intuition Study (NCT05058950) with Apple—one of the largest decentralized, real-world studies on cognitive health, with more than 22,000 participants. His earlier work at CAMH’s Krembil Centre for Neuroinformatics included founding Aid4Mental.Health, a digital health research group aimed at better understanding what treatments in CNS work for whom, when, and for how long in everyday settings.
He holds academic appointments at Boston University and the University of Washington and is a Visiting Research Fellow at King’s College London. Across roles, Dr. Pratap is committed to building empathetic, data-driven, and outcome-focused solutions that improve the lives of people living with CNS disorders.