Project description
An innovative platform for early Alzheimer's diagnosis
Among the major problems scientists and health systems face is Alzheimer's disease (AD). It affects millions of people and constant growth in number of patients is expected in the next decade. Early diagnosis of the disease can prevent its fast evolution and allow provision of accurate healthcare. However, there is a lack of such a reliable method. The EU-funded NORATEST project has developed an innovative platform able to detect neurodegenerative diseases early. It combines biomarkers' 'signatures' tracked in the blood with a sophisticated computer algorithm that permits the identification of AD or other neurodegenerative diseases at early stages. The innovative technology is fast, cost-effective, accurate, highly scalable and flexible. The platform will be commercialised online in the EU and United States markets.
Objective
Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a major medical problem and is currently an issue of global general interest as the total number of people with dementia is projected to reach ~80M in 2030 and almost duplicating this number by 2050. The lack of an efficient and affordable solution in the AD's health care sector has motivated our company Alzohis to develop NORATEST, a very unique and innovative e-Health platform producing significant improvements, in terms of speed efficiency, in the detection of neurodegenerative diseases. By means of a novel combination of biomarkers “signatures” detectable in the blood with a state-of-the-art computer algorithm NORATEST can discriminate patients suffering AD from those healthy ones, as well as detecting other neurodegenerative diseases. Our prototype, currently at TRL6, is the first reliable non-invasive molecular diagnostic method able to detect the disease in the very early stages, offering several competitive and innovative advantages such as: Cost-effective novel technology, fast, accurate, early ddiagnosis, data privacy coupled to smart analytics, user-friendly and highly scalable and adaptable platform. Our business model is a pay-per-use combined model of charging per analysis and direct online sales. The global AD market shows great opportunities for us since it was worth €2.5 B in 2016 and is set to reach €12.6 B by 2026 (CAGR of 17.5%). Worldwide we expect a market growth in both established and in developing countries, anticipating >5M annual AD's diagnoses in the two main markets leaders based in Europe (2.5-3.5M diagnoses/year) and USA (1.5-2.5M diagnoses/year) by 2024. Our company goal is to become the reference for AD's diagnosis in Europe. We estimated that in 5 years (end of Phase 2 project), we will accumulate 360K diagnosis tests sales (revenue €54M) accounting for ~2% of the EU and USA market. We expect to hire 40 new technical and sales employees and earn ~€32M profit, with a ROI of 6.5.
Fields of science
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
SME-1 - SME instrument phase 1Coordinator
91400 PARIS
France
The organization defined itself as SME (small and medium-sized enterprise) at the time the Grant Agreement was signed.