15 January marked the fourth anniversary of the official launch of the European Prevention of Alzheimer’s Dementia (EPAD) initiative, in Paris. To celebrate turning four, EPAD looked back at some of its key achievements of the past 12 months.
16 January: The EPAD Academy has officially started its first activity by proposing online webinars by world-class senior researchers on current topics in Alzheimer’s disease research for EPAD young researchers.
27 February: Alzheimer Europe held a successful lunch debate entitled “Will we be able to prevent Alzheimer’s dementia” at the European Parliament in Brussels (Belgium). The panel included a presentation by Craig Ritchie (UEDIN) who looked at what the EPAD project can offer in terms of research into prevention.
23 May: The EPAD General Assembly took place in Amsterdam under the banner “How to assure sustainability” and welcomed more than 180 attendees.
7 June: EPAD was on the news in Australia. Craig Ritchie gave a plenary lecture “Preventing Dementia: False Promise or True Progress” at the International Dementia Conference in Sydney and mentioned EPAD.
26 July: For the first time, the EPAD study was exhibited via a large EPAD booth in the exhibition area as well as hosted a satellite symposium dedicated to the EPAD Proof of Concept trial at AAIC (Chicago, US). It also took this opportunity to launch the new EPAD website and to release a new EPAD brochure.
10 August: The EPAD family of trial delivery centres grew to 20 sites with Brescia (Italy) enrolling its first research participant.
29 August: The EPAD’s Scottish team were lucky to visit the stunning University of Aberdeen campus for the inaugural EPAD Scotland conference. The event gathered almost 80 delegates including participants, site staff and the wider Scottish EPAD team.
21 September: It is a date the EPAD team will not easily forget, as the 1,000th EPAD Research Participant has joined the EPAD family by volunteering to participate in the EPAD Longitudinal Cohort Study (LCS).
October: The EPAD project was presented at various events including the IMI scientific symposium (Brussels, Belgium), CTAD (Barcelona, Spain), Alzheimer Europe Conference (Barcelona, Spain) and NHS Research Scotland Annual Conference (Perth, Scotland). The team also took the opportunity to officially release its first wave of data including the baseline data from its first 500 research participants at CTAD.
November: The EPAD team ispleased that EPAD LCS marked its best month to date for recruitment of research participants in November 2018 with 118 new research participants enrolled. Theyalso welcomed the 39th EPAD partner to the project MSD (Merck Sharp and Dohme).
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.