The first quarter of 2018 started with great intensity! We were busy working towards opening new sites and improving recruitment.
Positive results of our work have begun to come out in a short time with specific progress achieved. First of all, we are delighted to have reached a big milestone in February 2018 when our EPAD Longitudinal Cohort Study (LCS) reached 500 participants screened. We are excited that we will be releasing our first 500 LCS participant data set soon! We are also pleased that EPAD LCS marked its best month to date for recruitment of research participants in March 2018 with 66 new research participants enrolled.
Besides seeing that each site is improving recruitment, 2018 had a great start with four new sites opened in Oxford (UK), Tayside (UK), Paris Nord (France) and Paris La Salpetrière (France). EPAD has now 14 sites enrolling and 640 research participants screened. There is a major drive to open new sites in the coming weeks. The great news is the number of new sites activated this month in April 2018 – the two most recent being Manchester and Bristol (UK) this week.
To ensure success of the project, continued efforts within all work packages are made with the cumulative goal of advancing research in Alzheimer’s Dementia. More LCS recruitment strategies have been implemented including PREPAD Velocity, installation of IQVIA LCS management under the leadership of University of Edinburgh, contractual & financial improvements, accelerating TDC opening, enhancing recruitment and ensuring high data quality and compliance with ICH-GCP. As a key action of the new communication plan (deliverable D6.4 submitted to IMI in March 2018), EPAD has also started to carry out specific actions to support the TDCs and the communication with research participants.
The EPAD project aims to develop a platform to investigate new treatments to prevent or delay the onset of Alzheimer’s dementia in people at risk of developing the condition. The building of that platform is on track to start in Q1 2019 – let’s aim for the next milestone – stay tuned.