Project description
The road to more accurate diagnostics for Alzheimer’s disease
Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a challenge in global health, marked by its prevalence and complex diagnostic hurdles. With a pre-symptomatic phase spanning decades, identifying and treating AD early remains elusive. Current clinical diagnostics for AD are suboptimal, leading to ineffective treatments, particularly in primary care settings. As such, there is an urgent need for more accurate diagnostics. In this context, the ERC-funded ADVANCE-AD project aims to revolutionise AD management using novel blood-based biomarkers. Firstly, it will overhaul clinical work-ups for symptomatic patients with scalable, non-invasive tools. Secondly, it will pioneer pre-symptomatic detection algorithms to fast-track effective therapies. By analysing existing trials, ADVANCE-AD aims to evaluate potential treatments, from statins to genetic therapies.
Objective
Alzheimers disease (AD) is the most common cause of dementia and a major global health challenge. AD has a long pre-symptomatic phase spanning several decades. The accuracy of clinical AD diagnostics is mediocre, especially in primary care. This results in suboptimal treatment and care, which is especially problematic in light of emerging anti-amyloid therapies. ADVANCE-AD aims to revolutionize AD diagnostics and prognostics and fast-track the development of new effective therapies by using novel blood-based biomarkers forbeta-amyloid, tau, neurodegeneration and neuroinflammation.
First, my team will transform the clinical work-up of symptomatic AD patients globally by developing scalable, non-invasive and cost-effective diagnostic and prognostic algorithms based on novel blood-based biomarkers and digital tools.
Second, disease-modifying therapies should be initiated already in the pre-symptomatic phase to be very effective. My team will therefore develop cost-effective diagnostic algorithms to identify AD pathology in individuals without cognitive symptoms, and prognostic algorithms to detect those most likely to develop symptoms and thereby benefit from new therapies. These new algorithms will then be used to recruit individuals into a pre-symptomatic trial-ready cohort to efficiently evaluate new anti-AD drugs.
Third, new drug candidates for our trial-ready cohort will be identified using large-scale analyses of the novel AD-related biomarkers in biobanked longitudinal blood samples from already performed randomized placebo-controlled trials. Using this high risk/high-gain approach, we will evaluate if different classes of existing drugs (e.g. statins, GLP-1 agonists, anti-inflammatory agents) can halt development of AD and neurodegeneration. Finally, a novel genetic anti-tau treatment will be evaluated in this trial-ready cohort.
ADVANCE-AD builds on world-leading research and will likely result in breakthroughs in early diagnostics and treatments for AD.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesneurobiology
- medical and health sciencesbasic medicineneurologydementiaalzheimer
- medical and health sciencesbasic medicinepathology
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Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC) Main Programme
Topic(s)
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC GrantsHost institution
22100 Lund
Sweden