Welcome
Welcome!
2016 marked the second full year of the EPAD project and saw us continue to develop impact in the Alzheimer’s research field. The innovations that underpinned EPAD showed themselves to be more broadly accepted and even emulated elsewhere. At the end of 2016 the EPAD work was presented at CTAD in San Diego and in the Alzheimer’s Europe Conference in Copenhagen with a focus on the ethics of disclosure, the adaptive trial design and the novel recruitment strategy of the PrePAD environment. Critically, we were not now presenting what we were planning to do but what we had done and even more importantly what we have delivered and what has worked!
At the end of the year recruitment in the Longitudinal Cohort Study marched forwards and passed 100 participants in early January 2017, our ethics worked package published key papers on disclosure and the trial protocol moved tantalisingly close to completion. Through 2017 we will continue to accumulate vast amounts of data and samples which will not only allow the EPAD community to develop better disease models of Alzheimer’s disease in the pre-dementia phase of illness as per our own objectives, but will also help develop external relationships with groups who wish to collaborate on analyses of both samples and data. EPAD has set it itself out to be a collaborative and open environment to maximise the highest quality knowledge of the greatest importance to the field.
As we look forward to 2017 from our solid foundation our key milestones are to recruit over 1,000 research participants into the EPAD Longitudinal Cohort Study, open up to 16 new Trial Delivery Centres, finalise the EPAD PoC protocol and continue to strengthen our pipeline of interventions. Moreover, we will propose during our General Assembly meeting in Stockholm the establishment of the EPAD Academy. We see this future proof body as the umbrella under which scientific findings from the project will be coordinated and published, relationships with external academic and research partners will be encouraged and managed and young researchers will be nurtured and developed. In addition, we will celebrate during the meeting the development of our Participants’ Panel. We also anticipate even closer working with colleagues across the world developing aligned and similar projects in the USA, Canada and Australia.
There will be many challenges that the world faces in 2017 though because of the strength of the EPAD Project, the quality and dedication of every professional working within our consortium, the commitment and motivation of every research participant and their study partners as well as the ongoing support of IMI means that we don’t envisage challenges to overcome in 2017, rather successes to be achieved.
This electronic newsletter will be published quarterly and be accessible via the EPAD website (www.ep-ad.org) and inform the Alzheimer community on EPAD’s main achievements, upcoming events as well as allow you to meet the scientists who make it all happen.
We hope you enjoy this issue of the EPAD newsletter! Happy Reading!
Craig Ritchie
EPAD Co-Coordinator
