ONE OF THE WORLD'S FIRST PERSONALISED BRAIN STIMULATION STUDIES SHOWS PROMISE FOR SEVERE OCD WITH NUH AND NUS MEDICINE EXTENDING THE APPROACH TO DEPRESSION AND ANXIETY

In a completed pilot of personalized, fMRI-guided TMS for severe, treatment-resistant OCD, two of four enrolled participants completed treatment and both improved: one reported a 78% symptom-score reduction by treatment’s end, reaching zero at six weeks, while the other improved 35% at four weeks before symptoms later returned and improved again after booster treatment. NUH and NUS Medicine will begin a separate study of 30 participants with depression and anxiety in October 2026, running through early 2029; the early OCD findings require validation in larger studies.

Analysis

Investment read-through: This is an option on a more targeted, potentially higher-value TMS workflow—not evidence of a near-term change in treatment economics. The commercial choke points are reproducibility across larger cohorts, clinician workflow, MRI capacity and payer willingness to reimburse imaging/modeling on top of stimulation. Shorter stimulation sessions alone may not improve clinic throughput if repeated scans, navigation and specialist time dominate the episode. NUS spin-off B1Neuro is the clearest named commercial beneficiary if its software is adopted beyond the current sites; the article provides no adoption, revenue or licensing data. Established TMS device vendors could benefit if personalization expands the addressable pool, but could also face pricing pressure if software shifts value away from hardware. DBS displacement is a distant possibility, not a current thesis: the evidence is far too preliminary to infer substitution in treatment-resistant OCD.

Catalysts and risks: Near term, the completed OCD work is hypothesis-generating: only two of four enrolled participants completed treatment, with no control arm. The reported depression/pTMS comparison is from a separate study and is not directly comparable to the standard-TMS result; do not capitalize the response-rate gap as a proven efficacy premium. Over 1–3 months, look for protocol details and independent replication. Over 6–18 months, the more consequential proof points are recruitment/completion, controlled symptom outcomes, durability, safety, and whether the depression/anxiety study yields a scalable targeting rule. Failure to replicate, weak persistence, high imaging burden or absent reimbursement would cap adoption. The release is not a regulatory or commercial milestone.

Key Decisions for Investors

• No immediate trade: NUH and NUS are not investable listed exposures, and the release does not establish a monetizable outcome. Avoid treating it as a catalyst for the broader TMS complex.
• Add B1Neuro to a private-company watchlist; verify product ownership/licensing, paid deployments beyond NUH and Mount Alvernia, recurring revenue, regulatory status, and whether the algorithm is validated prospectively before assigning commercial value.
• For listed TMS-device exposure, monitor named vendors such as BrainsWay and Neuronetics rather than buying on this item. Reassess only if larger controlled studies show durable benefit and adoption data indicate incremental procedure volume or pricing; falsification would be poor replication or no evidence of payer uptake.
• Track the depression/anxiety study through its planned enrollment and publication milestones. Treat recruitment, attrition, blinded/control design, durability and MRI hours per patient as key alerts: these determine whether personalization is clinically useful and operationally scalable.