New FP7 eHealth Project - PredictAD

VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, GE Healthcare, a division of the General Electric Company (NYSE: GE) and a Consortium of leading research institutions across Europe announced the PredictAD project, a research collaboration aimed at developing new diagnostic procedures for patients with Alzheimer's disease. Today there is no single test or biomarker that can predict whether a particular person will develop Alzheimer's disease and a definitive diagnosis is only possible after death - with postmortem analysis.

PredictAD is an EU funded research project which will study imaging biomarkers (MRI, PET FDG and PET PIB), electrical brain activity measurement and blood based markers (proteomics and metabolomics) and develop methods for how to combine data from different biomarkers. Combining this multisource information may enable earlier diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease, but may also provide crucial information used for differentiating between various forms of dementia and for assessing disease severity. It may also allow for improved detection of disease progression and treatment efficacy monitoring.

"The aim of PredictAD project 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 analyzing 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," says the Scientific Coordinator of the project, Dr. Jyrki Lötjönen from VTT.

"According to the latest estimates, the global prevalence of Alzheimer's disease is predicted to quadruple to 106 million by 2050¹. Thus, there is a critical need for effective diagnostic tools to help in the early diagnosis of this debilitating disease," says Dr. Lennart Thurfjell, Head of Diagnostic Software, Medical Diagnostics at GE Healthcare.

At a later stage during this three-year project, a selected biomarker set will be used to develop an efficient and reliable software solution that can be used by a physician to assess the risk, to diagnose and to monitor the progress of Alzheimer's disease in real clinical conditions using various patient data. The accuracy, usability and cost-effectiveness of the models and software will be clinically evaluated.

Currently, there is no curative treatment for Alzheimer's disease. If new drugs or prevention strategies were proven to be effective, an early diagnosis may enable doctors to provide medical care at an earlier stage, at a time when clinical diagnosis using only signs and symptoms of disease is challenging.

"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 diagnostic solutions for Alzheimer's disease," Dr. Thurfjell sums up.

Dementia causes long and oppressive suffering to patients and their relatives, and imposes enormous costs on society. Affecting more than 5 million people in Europe, Alzheimer's disease is the most common cause of dementia; it covers 50-70 % of all dementia cases. Estimated costs of Alzheimer's disease to European society are more than 55 billion € per annum. As the proportion of elderly people of population is increasing these costs are becoming a real burden to the society. Therefore a major breakthrough in Alzheimer's disease prevention and treatment is vital also in the economical sense.

With a consortium of top-level European research and industrial partners, the PredictAD project takes an important step towards an early approach to Alzheimer's disease prediction and management. Public and private partners from 8 research,academic, industrial and medical organizations from four different European countries will form the research consortium. PredictAD consortium members are VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, GE Healthcare (UK), Nextim Ltd. (Finland), University of Kuopio (Finland), Imperial College London (UK), Uppsala University (Sweden), University of Milan (Italy) and Rigshospitalet (Denmark).

For further information, please visit:
http://www.predictad.eu

Related article:

About VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland
VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland is a contract research organisation involved in many international assignments. With its more than 2800 employees, VTT provides a wide range of technology and applied research services for its clients, private companies, institutions and the public sector. VTT is striving to improve the well-being of society and to enhance the technical and economic performance of its clients. Website: www.vtt.fi

About GE Healthcare
GE Healthcare provides transformational medical technologies and services that are shaping a new age of patient care. Our expertise in medical imaging and information technologies, medical diagnostics, patient monitoring systems, performance improvement, drug discovery, and biopharmaceutical manufacturing technologies is helping clinicians around the world re-imagine new ways to predict, diagnose, inform, treat and monitor disease, so patients can live their lives to the fullest.

GE Healthcare's broad range of products and services enable healthcare providers to better diagnose and treat cancer, heart disease, neurological diseases and other conditions earlier. Our vision for the future is to enable a new "early health" model of care focused on earlier diagnosis, pre-symptomatic disease detection and disease prevention. Headquartered in the United Kingdom, GE Healthcare is a $17 billion unit of General Electric Company (NYSE:GE). Worldwide, GE Healthcare employs more than 46,000 people committed to serving healthcare professionals and their patients in more than 100 countries. Website: www.gehealthcare.com

Most Popular Now

Unlocking the 10 Year Health Plan

The government's plan for the NHS is a huge document. Jane Stephenson, chief executive of SPARK TSL, argues the key to unlocking its digital ambitions is to consider what it...

Alcidion Grows Top Talent in the UK, wit…

Alcidion has today announced the addition of three new appointments to their UK-based team, with one internal promotion and two external recruits. Dr Paul Deffley has been announced as the...

AI can Find Cancer Pathologists Miss

Men assessed as healthy after a pathologist analyses their tissue sample may still have an early form of prostate cancer. Using AI, researchers at Uppsala University have been able to...

AI, Full Automation could Expand Artific…

Automated insulin delivery (AID) systems such as the UVA Health-developed artificial pancreas could help more type 1 diabetes patients if the devices become fully automated, according to a new review...

How AI could Speed the Development of RN…

Using artificial intelligence (AI), MIT researchers have come up with a new way to design nanoparticles that can more efficiently deliver RNA vaccines and other types of RNA therapies. After training...

MIT Researchers Use Generative AI to Des…

With help from artificial intelligence, MIT researchers have designed novel antibiotics that can combat two hard-to-treat infections: drug-resistant Neisseria gonorrhoeae and multi-drug-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA). Using generative AI algorithms, the research...

New Training Year Starts at Siemens Heal…

In September, 197 school graduates will start their vocational training or dual studies in Germany at Siemens Healthineers. 117 apprentices and 80 dual students will begin their careers at Siemens...

AI Hybrid Strategy Improves Mammogram In…

A hybrid reading strategy for screening mammography, developed by Dutch researchers and deployed retrospectively to more than 40,000 exams, reduced radiologist workload by 38% without changing recall or cancer detection...

Penn Developed AI Tools and Datasets Hel…

Doctors treating kidney disease have long depended on trial-and-error to find the best therapies for individual patients. Now, new artificial intelligence (AI) tools developed by researchers in the Perelman School...

Are You Eligible for a Clinical Trial? C…

A new study in the academic journal Machine Learning: Health discovers that ChatGPT can accelerate patient screening for clinical trials, showing promise in reducing delays and improving trial success rates. Researchers...

New AI Tool Addresses Accuracy and Fairn…

A team of researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai has developed a new method to identify and reduce biases in datasets used to train machine-learning algorithms...

Global Study Reveals How Patients View M…

How physicians feel about artificial intelligence (AI) in medicine has been studied many times. But what do patients think? A team led by researchers at the Technical University of Munich...