PREDICTOM

At VUB TT ERIS, we had a chance to talk to prof. dr. Sebastiaan Engelborghs and ask him 2 questions:

What is PREDICTOM about?

“PREDICTOM is about ‘precision interventions’ to reduce the risk of cognitive decline and Alzheimer disease (AD). This project is urgently needed in the light of the upcoming disease-modifying therapies for AD.

Hereto, PREDICTOM aims to change the clinical pathway in which people are screened and diagnosed for early-stage dementia, including AD, by using home-based screening and providing general practitioners (GPs) with novel technologies to more accurately identify people with a high risk of AD.  

As such, at first, patients will receive more timely personalised interventions (prevention, early treatment to avoid complications, etc) to reduce morbidity and mortality from major diseases, improving the lives of citizens.

To this purpose, healthcare professionals will have access to a screening platform and clinically validated biomarkers for identifying people at risk of disease to facilitate the selection of the most appropriate preventative action.

To obtain these achievements, PREDICTOM will count on researchers who will develop new biomarkers for prediction and prevention. So, PREDICTOM aims at facilitating the identification of individual risk factors, enabling to target the right risk-reduction intervention to the right person, at the right disease stage while safeguarding maximal effect.

Why is it important for VUB ?

VUB and its University Hospital (UZ Brussel) has all necessary expertise and provisions to take part in clinical trials, with access to neuroimaging tools like MRI and PET, and a clinical neurochemistry lab. In this project, VUB will share data of existing cohorts for biomarker assessment and will be involved in the prospective characterisation of memory clinic patients.  All partners from different disciplines, which are sharing their expertise, will be working together in a harmonized way ensuring that all tasks are integrated in synergy supporting PREDICTOM.

AIM

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and related disorders leading to dementia are associated with staggering costs and suffering. Recently, there has been some progress in the search for effective therapeutic interventions and it is clear that any treatment is likely to be most effective if administered at the earliest stage of disease, but the health care system is not ready for this new scenario. There is an urgent need, therefore, to establish scalable, cost-efficient diagnostic markers, tools and procedures that can identify people at increased risk, at point of care for stratification into personalized interventions to prevent or delay dementia.

METHODOLOGY

PREDICTOM will develop an open-source, interoperable and customisable biomarker screening platform, utilizing an existing online resource to save time and money, to generate an evidence base for general population screening for AD and related disorders. We will bring diagnostics closer to the patient by examining the feasibility of using samples, which can be obtained at home (e.g. finger-prick blood, saliva -for genetics and epigenetics- and stool for microbiome) for diagnostic biomarker analysis.

We will also evaluate innovative technologies for disease risk identification, including digital technologies and novel MRI, EEG, eye tracking, and blood-based biomarkers. The platform will use artificial intelligence models to analyse data from all biomarkers to identify users at high risk of developing dementia and to direct them to personalized intervention to prevent further cognitive decline and development of dementia.

We will seek to facilitate a change in current healthcare practice for early diagnosis of AD through development of new clinical practice guidelines based on evidence generated in the project.

IMPACT

By improving the ease of identification of those with early signs of dementia, we expect to have a significant impact on personalised medicine, which very timely, giving the upcoming disease-modifying therapies for AD. Moreover, this project will have a significant impact on the personal and financial burden of dementia in Europe and across the world.