Welcome
Dear Friends and Colleagues,
Since the last newsletter we’ve enjoyed a hugely successful General Assembly in Amsterdam and made a big splash at AAIC in Chicago and have seen tangible and positive developments entering several compounds into the EPAD trial pipeline. Would be remiss not to also mention the successes in the cohort study but in some ways it is to be now expected that part of the project is in great shape.
Let’s start with the General Assembly hosted by our friends at VUMC. There were lots of stand out moments at the GA and for different people there were different things. What though I heard consistently was how awesome the Early Career Researchers session was – I think it brought together two key aspects. Firstly, that the future of AD research is in great hands and secondly that the project is at last beginning to yield data for academic output and new knowledge. I have no doubt that in Geneva next year the GA will be dominated by research findings from the EPAD project. I also think that the confidence we all now have in the project underpinned the work we have been doing in how we turn our face outwards to the public, other academics and our partners and friends in industry. We have a new website just launched and we are now a key component part of the Collaboration for Alzheimer’s Prevention with other major and global research initiatives such as DIAN, A4, API and GAAIN. This collaboration will ensure that each project contributes effectively and meaningfully to the drive for dementia prevention – EPAD plays a crucial part. We have also just heard that the NHMRC in Australia have granted significant funds to set up ADNET that EPAD has helped in the development of and will also hopefully partner in as seamless way as possible in joint delivery projects.
The recent outward looking face was at AAIC in Chicago this year. Although we had no data driven presentations (that will all come in Barcelona at CTAD in October) we still made a ‘big splash’ with a large Booth in the exhibition area as well as hosted a modest size gathering for companies and investors keen to understand more about EPAD and the benefits to them of using the platform for drug development. The set-up of this event came at a time where we were having strong interest from a handful of companies but no firm commitments. Maybe because of continuing disappointment with more traditional approaches to study design and delivery, the interest in EPAD has noticeably increased in recent months and our ‘launch’ of the PoC platform in Chicago is really accelerating rather than initiating commitments. With this success though we come back full circle to the cohort study…
We currently stand at 900 research participants across 21 active centres. More centres will be open by the end of the year to maybe as many as 35. Open and opening TDCs need to do all they can to make sure the LCS recruitment is really strong so we can fulfil our commitments to the PoC. These TDCs are not alone and any good ideas for helping to optimise recruitment will be taken on board by the LCS Task Force whose sole aim is to help TDCs achieve and maybe even expand their recruitment potential. Across the project we are working closely with WP3 leadership on innovative ideas for new register development especially for clinical populations and national leads and coordinators will play a pivotal role in this thinking and delivery.
Finally, we plan to release the first data set from the cohort study before the autumn. We have set up a few key research questions simply to ‘stress test’ a comprehensive system for facilitating data request and access. We are confident that this will go well and that by late autumn we will have a fully operational system for all partners to use and then be able to effectively and efficiently work together on delivering research outputs. The next step will be to work out a mechanism to push our data out for open access in early 2019 to all researchers globally.
All our efforts – and they have been huge efforts from so many people – are at a point of coming to fruition with new knowledge generated, innovative compounds about to be tested and substantial influence and leadership of a global effort to prevent dementia.
There are so many ways to think about this project but the one characteristic of EPAD I keep coming back to that sums up where we are at in summer 2018 is – ‘Confidence’
With that confidence will come success.
This electronic newsletter will be published quarterly and be accessible via the EPAD website (https://alzheimer.noemi.lu) to inform the Alzheimer’s community on EPAD’s main achievements and upcoming events as well as allowing you to meet the scientists who make it all happen.
We hope you enjoy this issue of the EPAD newsletter! Happy reading and enjoy the rest of your summer.
Craig Ritchie
EPAD Coordinator
