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MELBOURNE, Australia

Prana Biotechnology Ltd (ASX:PBT/NASDAQ:PRAN) is pleased to announce that further analysis of the cognitive results of its Reach2HD trial to treat Huntington Disease was presented in a poster¹ at the American Neurological Association (ANA) Annual Meeting in Baltimore, United States.

Previously it has been reported that executive function as measured by the Trail Making Test Part B (TMTB) was significantly improved in the Reach2HD trial². Moreover, as previously announced at the Movement Disorders conference at Berlin this year³, of those patients in Reach2HD that reported cognitive improvement using the Huntington Disease Patient-Reported Outcome of Problems, or ‘HD-PROP’ assessment, 90% had received Prana PBT2 treatment.

This new analysis being reported today was undertaken to further explore the verbatim patient-reported outcomes captured by the HD-PROP by applied Natural Language Processing (NLP). The poster titled Applying Natural Language Processing (NLP) to Verbatim Patient Reported Outcomes explores natural language processing and memory activity of patients enrolled in the Reach2HD clinical trial and was presented by Professor Ira Shoulson and Dr Karen Anderson and research colleagues at the Georgetown MedStar University (Washington DC).

Using NLP methods to extract relationships and meaning from large text-based resources, such as the HD-PROP verbatim data, word clouds (images composed of words from a text where the size of the word indicates frequency or importance) were derived from the HD-PROP data in the Reach2HD trial at baseline and week 26. The Reach2HD NLP data showed a decrease in “memory” complaints at week 26 in the PBT2 250mg treatment compared with placebo. This improvement in cognitive function using the NLP computer based examination of the patient reported data, supports the positive cognition findings with PBT2 to date from both the HD-PROP assessment and the TMTB rating scale.

Dr Karen Anderson, study principal investigator stated: “The study shows the potential of listening to subjects’ own reports about how a treatment impacts them, rather than relying only on clinician ratings.”

¹ ANA Abstract Submission NLP 4.8.16 and NLP Poster

² Huntington Study Group Reach2HD Investigators (2015). Safety, tolerability, and efficacy of PBT2 in Huntington’s disease: a Phase 2, randomised, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial. Lancet Neurol.14(1):39-47. Published Online November 14, 2014 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S1474-4422(14)70262-5

³ 20^th Annual International Movement Disorder Society Congress, Berlin 22 June, 2016

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