"Based on these findings, AD-gut project aimed at designing and optimizing an efficient encapsulation strategy to guarantee the survival and delivery of probiotic strains in the gut as opposed to standard strategies targeting directly the brain. A successful accomplishment of these goals allowed us to derive potential AD risk factors and to establish an objective baseline setting for AD diagnosis. Ultimately, the present project will open new horizons in biomedical diagnostics and personalized medicine through the marketing of these technologies and therapeutic concepts.
The core of AD-gut integrates 3 subprojects: encapsulation of probiotics, deciphering the microbiome, and understanding induced microbiome alterations due to neurodegenerative disorders. The results gathered in the framework of the project are given for each scientific work package dedicated sections.
As shown by our dissemination and communication activities (described in the WP5), our project has been successfully disseminated through 29 peer-reviewed publications published in respected scientific journals.
At the launch of the project, a first EPFL press release has been published.
During the MAF 2017 conference, which took place from 10th to 13th September 2017 in Bruges, Belgium, our AD-gut project has been presented to the public. A booth was available for the participants.
Moreover, as part of our major scientific results promotion, an EPFL press release has been published at the acceptance of our publication “Combined multi-plane phase retrieval and super-resolution optical fluctuation imaging for 4D cell microscopy” in Nature Photonics. In addition, due to the importance of the work, it was as well covered by other media news and blogs.
Another EPFL press release has been published in relation to our publication in Nature Methods ""Parameter-free image resolution estimation based on decorrelation analysis"", partly linked to AD-gut project.
Finally, for our mid-term results, an additional EPFL press release has been published about our joint publication (KUL/EPFL), partly linked to AD-gut project, “Identifying microbial species by single-molecule DNA optical mapping and resampling statistics” accepted in Nucleic Acids Research (NAR) Genomics and Bioinformatics.
We are planning at least 3 more publications that will be related to AD-gut project (OPT imaging of the gut, benchmarking of optical mapping with other state of the art sequencing technologies, results related to the efficacy of prebiotic cocktails).
In addition, Consortium plans to exploit its cohesion and project results to apply to open calls from EU and to further develop approaches introduced within our project and hopefully lead to progress in new methods."
