From 15-17 May 2019, the EPAD project hosted its annual General Assembly meeting in Geneva (Switzerland). We were delighted that the event brought together EPAD delegates to discuss progress, latest developments and future plans. In attendance were scientists, researchers, representatives from pharmaceutical companies, patient organisations, SMEs, EPAD study site members, other experts and research participants from across many different countries, who make up the EPAD family (also referred to as \u201cEpadistas\u201d!). The meeting was hosted by the Centre de la m\u00e9moire of the Geneva University Hospital, the University of Geneva and the Centre Leenaards de la m\u00e9moire of the Centre Hospitalier Universitaire Vaudois de Lausanne and kindly co-sponsored by MSD and Janssen. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The General Assembly meeting commenced with Giovanni Frisoni, Serge Van der Geyten and Craig Ritchie welcoming almost 200 attendees (exceeding any of our past General Assembly meetings). They reflected the evolution of EPAD and introduced the agenda for the coming days. Craig Ritchie then briefly introduced the EPAD project, explained the EPAD flow and its crucial components. The EPAD Proof-of-Concept (PoC) platform has been developed to speed up the development of effective, safe medicines which slow down or prevent the development of Alzheimer\u2019s dementia. Craig stated that the recruitment into the EPAD PoC is exclusively from the EPAD Longitudinal Cohort Study (LCS). It was interesting to hear that the EPAD PoC team is being directly approached by many potential Intervention Owners. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
We have now entered the final year of EPAD, with the project officially ending by the end of December 2019. However, there was an exciting announcement that EPAD will formally request IMI to grant a no-cost 6-month extension to the project. 2019 is going to be a year of transition for EPAD as we look forward to the post-IMI period, named EPAD 2.0.
The next session was then dedicated to the EPAD sustainability Work-Package. The team behind WP7 has made significant progress with the aim to help create a sustainable EPAD platform for the prevention of Alzheimer\u2019s dementia which would continue the work already undertaken during the IMI funding of EPAD. Different scenarios and approaches for the project\u2019s future were shared and punctuated by lively discussions. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The second day was full with a variety of talks from Work Package\nleads and members. Project outcomes were presented to the Consortium together\nwith the updates on the current activities. It\u2019s amazing to think that we\nhave entered the final year of EPAD and there are a lot of incredible\nachievements to look back at! As a start, the current LCS status and the\nprogress done so far were reported. We were glad to see the EPAD family of\nTrial Delivery Centres (TDCs) growing \u2013 we currently have 23 sites open of\nwhich 21 are already enrolling across 7 European countries and more than 1,600\nresearch participants screened. We just welcomed two new sites on board that\nwere activated in May 2019 – Fundacio ACE (Barcelona, Spain) and Centre\nHospitalier Universitaire Vaudois (Lausanne, Switzerland). Additionally, over\nthe next weeks and months we will open additional sites since TDCs from a total\nof 11 European countries are identified for participation in EPAD. It was interesting to hear from Kristy Draper,\nEPAD Global Trial Lead (the University of Edinburgh), who introduced the potential PoC appendices and the progress towards the first PoC\nTrial. All vendors have been selected and the necessary processes are in place.\nThe contract negotiations and appendix drafting are ongoing and the team is\naiming for a start next year with the inclusion of the first candidate for the\nPoC in Q2 2020. We\nwere pleased to witness how EPAD enables researchers from all over Europe to collaborate\nand share findings to pull together a world-leading project that aims to\nprevent Alzheimer\u2019s dementia. Following the Work Package updates, Elisabetta\nVaudano IMI Principal Scientific Officer, gave a presentation on IMI and shared\nsome recommendations. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
After an energetic coffee break, the afternoon session focused around workshops, giving everyone the opportunity to attend parallel sessions of interest. These breakout sessions on amyloid disclosure, online registries, sample management and data access were hugely valuable. One of the highlights was the presentation of the EPAD Research Access Process, designed to give academic researchers and institutions from all over the world a way of accessing the data, samples and imaging data collected during the EPAD LCS. The study data is made available in secure online workspaces in order to facilitate collaboration between people and teams with similar research aims. Another exciting announcement came on the second day that we now have released the first wave of data (v500.0) from our research participants. The data are now available for EPAD researchers only until November when access will be opened to the entire research community.\u00a0That said, EPAD members can now begin the application process. The second day was concluded with a nice networking dinner at a typical Swiss restaurant. Before that, the EPAD\u2019s team were lucky enough to enjoy a pleasure cruise on Lake Geneva (Lac L\u00e9man) with great views of the lake and mountains around. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The third and final day of the meeting hosted a question &\nanswer session where all delegates had the opportunity to interact with the\nEPAD leadership. They received some great questions from the audience. Engaging\ndiscussions were held on the PoC platform, EPAD data, sustainability and future\nactivities. Finally, the EPAD Consortium gathered for an EPAD Academy session. 60\nyoung researchers (EPAD fellows) are now part of the EPAD Academy that aims to\nefficiently leverage EPAD resources to foster and develop academic research\ncapacity and output in Alzheimer\u2019s disease across Europe for maximum global\nimpact. We heard from six EPAD fellows about their respective work covering pre-screening\nfor EPAD trial-ready cohort, cognitive disease progression modelling, staging\ncortical amyloid deposition, fluid biomarkers in preclinical Alzheimer\u2019s\ndisease, theory of change methodology and cognitive decline prediction through\nstructural MRI biomarkers. The EPAD\nfellows\u2019 talks were an engaging end to an overall fascinating General Assembly\nmeeting. The meeting was then brought to a close by Craig Ritchie and Serge Van\nder Geyten. We are very thankful to everyone who came along and we would like\nto thank all Epadistas for their enthusiasm and dedication. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
During the three days, research participants were in the\nspotlight. It is important to the EPAD team that we build a conversation with\nour participants. We are committed to involving research participants as much\nas possible in the development of the project, empowering everyone to play an\nactive role in our progress. Our participants are our partners in this project\ntoo. We\u2019re very thankful that nine research participants from France, Scotland,\nSpain and the Netherlands were willing to come to the General Assembly. During\nthe second day of the meeting, they had the opportunity to meet together within\nthe breakout session organised for the research participant panels. We were\ntruly humbled that they took the floor to kick start the last and final day of\nthe event to share their views and experiences of being a research participant\nin EPAD. We wish to say a huge thank you to all of the participants again – we\ncan\u2019t do any of this without you!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It is a really exciting time for EPAD and for the PoC in specific. We look forward\nto the next months ahead!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
From 15-17 May 2019, the EPAD project hosted its annual General Assembly meeting in Geneva (Switzerland). We were delighted that the event brought together EPAD delegates to discuss progress, latest developments and future plans. In attendance were scientists, researchers, representatives from pharmaceutical companies, patient organisations, SMEs, EPAD study site members, other experts and research participants […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3351,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3350","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ep-ad.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3350","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ep-ad.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ep-ad.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ep-ad.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ep-ad.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3350"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ep-ad.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3350\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ep-ad.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3351"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ep-ad.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3350"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ep-ad.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3350"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ep-ad.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3350"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}