European consortium launches PredictAD for Alzheimer’s disease diagnosis

PredictAD, a three-year collaborative research project aimed at developing new diagnostic procedures for patients with Alzheimer’s disease has been launched. Members of the consortium include research, academic, industrial and medical organisations throughout Europe such as VTT Technical Research Centre, Nextim Ltd and the University of Kuopio in Finland, Imperial College London and GE Healthcare in the UK, Uppsala University in Sweden, the University of Milan in Italy and Rigshospitalet in Denmark.

Alzheimer’s affects around 3 million people in Europe and costs, says the European Journal of Neurology, €55 billion per year. There is no cure for Alzheimer’s yet, so techniques which enable early diagnosis of the disease are essential for the development of drugs and prevention strategies.

The Scientific Coordinator of PredictAD, Jyrki Lötjönen of VTT, said: “The aim of PredictAD is to develop an objective indicator to diagnose Alzheimer’s disease at the earliest stage possible. This may be possible by combining data from various data sources of patient monitoring, such as neuropsychological tests, medical imaging, electrical brain activity measurements, and analysing protein and metabolomics levels of blood samples. Early diagnostics may play an important role in effective medical treatment of Alzheimer’s disease, especially in the future, as the next generation of more effective therapies become available for all patients.”

Lennart Thurfjell, Head of Diagnostic Software, Medical Diagnostics at GE Healthcare, said: “According to the latest estimates, the global prevalence of Alzheimer’s disease is predicted to quadruple to 106 million by 2050. Thus, there is a critical need for effective diagnostic tools to help in the early diagnosis of this debilitating disease.”

It is expected that at later stage of the project a set of specific biomarkers will be used to develop a software solution which will enable clinicians and physicians to assess risk, diagnose and monitor Alzheimer’s disease progression using patient data.

Thurfjell added: “PredictAD fits perfectly with GE Healthcare’s Early Health vision as it will help us gain important knowledge, not only about individual biomarkers, but also about how they may combine for early detection and therapy response monitoring. Improving our understanding of the role that different imaging and non-imaging biomarkers play during the disease process is the key as we strive to develop new diagnostics solutions for Alzheimer’s disease.”