The European Prevention of Alzheimer’s Dementia (EPAD) project, originally scheduled to end in December 2019, has been extended. The Innovative Medicines Initiative has approved the request for a 6-month no-cost extension to the project, setting the end date in June 2020. This extension will allow the delivery of the start of the first EPAD Proof of Concept (PoC) appendix within the official lifetime of the project as well as the implementation of a sustainability model that allows EPAD to continue its activities after June 2020. The project started in January 2015 with the goal of streamlining the testing and development of preventative treatments for Alzheimer’s disease. To this end, EPAD has been developing a platform on which new compounds can be tested in an efficient way, delivering more effective, targeted interventions that can slow or stop dementia.
By combining knowledge and expertise from 39 organisations across multiple sectors, EPAD has been able to accomplish a lot over the last 4.5 years. Examples of these accomplishments are the EPAD Register, the EPAD Longitudinal Cohort Study currently recruiting in 23 European sites and with more than 1800 research participants screened, and, the establishment of the PoC framework. Good progress has been made on the PoC pipeline and the contract negotiations with the upcoming Intervention Owners. The team is looking forward to the inclusion of the first participant in the first PoC appendix in Q2 2020. In addition, over the past few months, the EPAD sustainability work package has made significant progress in making sure that EPAD can continue running during the post IMI period, renamed as EPAD2.0, as of July 2020. The EPAD project has received support from the Innovative Medicines Initiative Joint Undertaking under grant agreement n° 115736, resources of which are composed of financial contribution from the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) and EFPIA companies’ in kind contribution.