PROMINENT is a collaborative pan-European public-private partnership funded through the Innovative Health Initiative (IHI) for five years. PROMINENT will create a digital platform for implementing precision medicine in neurodegenerative disease. The first application of this platform is to assist clinicians with individualised decision support in the evaluation of patients with suspected cognitive impairment due to dementia. The goal is to help clinicians make optimal use of emerging technologies to diagnose and treat dementia disorders, such as new blood biomarkers and disease-modifying therapies for Alzheimer’s disease. As the consortium looks back at a fruitful collaboration in 2023, the project teams have been busy over recent months.
This article provides an overview of the latest activities. The prediction models and diagnostic algorithms team (Work Package 1 – WP1), led by Karolinska Insitutet, established research questions, defined inclusion and exclusion criteria, designed a search strategy, based on which it performed a systematic scoping review on diagnostic and prognostic multimodal prediction models in Alzheimer’s disease. The protocol for the systematic review has been published online: doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/ZKW6G
The deliverable report to the IHI about this work is about to be submitted and work on a peer reviewed publication about this in collaboration with members from Alzheimer Europe has started. You can read an interview with Xin Xia, who is leading on this work here: https://www.ihi-prominent.eu/spotlight-on-early-career-researchers-an-interview-with-xin-xia/
In the pursuit to develop its own model to prediction disease courses in neurodegeneration, partners from the Barcelonaβeta Brain Research Center (BBRC) created a data template with the common fields between the model training cohort’s data, using their data dictionaries as a reference. This document will be used as a basis for the inclusion of variables for the predictive models. Alzheimer Europe visited BBRC to learn more about their work and filmed them explaining the predictive modelling approaches as well as their usefulness. You can watch the videos here:
The team responsible for the digital platform development (WP2) highlighted that the tool for DaTSCAN quantification, cDAT, has received CE-marking and it is reviewed by Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for the US market. An important part of the platform is cNeuro. This is a continuation of the previously developed predictND tool. cNeuro is a so-called ‘clinical decision support system (CDSS)’, that combines all available clinical data, including demographics, neuropsychological test results, CSF biomarkers, APOE genotyping, and automatically defined MRI features (cMRI60) to distinguish between the four most prevalent disease groups (Alzheimer’s disease, Lewy Body Dementia, Frontotemporal dementia, and vascular dementia) and cognitively healthy controls. You can read an interview with Aniek van Gils, PhD student at Amsterdam UMC who recently published a paper on a usability study of cNeuro in memory clinics here:
https://www.ihi-prominent.eu/spotlight-on-early-career-researchers-an-interview-with-aniek-van-gils/
The development of patient and caregiver reports is currently ongoing with the incorporation of feedback from the PROMINENT Public Involvement Advisory Board which is led by Alzheimer Europe, you can read about the consultation here:
The third meeting of the Public Involvement Board will take place via Zoom on 29 May. During this meeting, the group will provide feedback on the clinical study protocol and participant-facing material. The real-world evidence generation team (WP3) is near finalisation of the list of contact persons at relevant Health Technology Assessment (HTA) agencies in a selection of countries to approach for a survey and interviews. This survey is currently being developed and reviewed on an ongoing basis. Its goal will be to collect information from the HTA-agencies to identify key endpoints for follow-up and evaluation of novel disease modifying therapies. The implementation, evaluation and validation study team (WP4) has prepared synopses for the evaluation and validation study, which is currently being circulated for feedback from all team members. Furthermore, they have started the process of identifying and contacting potential new partners for WP4 and held a consultation meeting with the Public Involvement Advisory Board to gather feedback on the design of the evaluation and validation study. You can read about the consultation here:
The dissemination, communication and dissemination team (WP5) has been busy with website updates, writing news posts referred to above, setting up the newsletter (which you can read here) and sharing interesting updates related to PROMINENT on social media channels. Make sure to subscribe to the channels to not miss out on news related to precision medicine in neurodegeneration:
https://linktr.ee/IHI_PROMINENT
The project management team (WP6) is happy to report that the amendment 1 for the inclusion of FBHI, FINGERS Brain Health Institute as project participant has been accepted after an EU review. The interim financial report has been finalised and a financial webinar was held online in February. The online workshop included important EU/IHI rules, an introduction to the Participant Portal, tips on what is important to think of, and what underlying documents need to be saved to be compliant with EU rules. The PROMINENT project has also initiated discussions with new clinical sites and one private member to onboard the project consortium.