AMYPAD - Amyloid imaging to Prevent Alzheimer’s Disease

AMYPAD is a consortium created in collaboration with IMI project EPAD (the European Prevention of Alzheimer’s Disease project http://ep-ad.org/).
It represents a public-private initiative with the following participants: 1. (Coord.) Stichting VU-VUmc, the Netherlands; 2.The University of Edinburgh (UEDIN), United Kingdom; 3. Barcelonabeta, Brain Research Center (BBRC), Spain; 4. Université de Genève (UNIGE) Switzerland; 5. Karolinska Institutet (KI), Sweden; 6. IXICO Technologies Ltd (IXICO), United Kingdom; 7.Centre Hospitalier Universitaire de Toulouse (CHUT), France; 8.University College London(UCL),United Kingdom; 9.Alzheimer Europe (AE) Luxembourg; 10. Synapse Research Management Partners S.L (SYNAPSE) Spain; 11. University Hospital of Cologne (UKK) Germany; 12. GE Healthcare Life Sciences (GE), United Kingdom; 13. Janssen Pharmaceutica NV (JPNV), Belgium; 14. Piramal Imaging (Piramal), United Kingdom; 15. Stichting Katholieke Universiteit (RUMC) The Netherlands.
AMYPAD aims to understand the value of imaging of β-amyloid using positron emission tomography (PET) in order to achieve 3 major goals: 1) improve the diagnostic workup of patients suspected to have Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) and their management; 2) understand the natural history of AD in a pre-symptomatic stage in order to better select patients for trials; 3) monitor change in β-amyloid deposition to quantify the impact of novel therapies.
The AMYPAD consortium will address the project objectives listed above by studying the onset, dynamics, and clinical relevance of brain β-amyloid in the spectrum from normal aging, through subjective cognitive decline towards mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and ultimately dementia to due to AD. We propose to use β-amyloid-PET in a large number of subjects (4000 subjects) recruited from population studies, as well as memory clinics cohorts. Collectively, they will span the range from completely normal aging to asymptomatic β-amyloid deposition and early AD. The cohorts will be followed with careful longitudinal monitoring and MRI to determine (surrogate) outcomes of cognitive decline and neurodegeneration. An important element of AMYPAD is longitudinal β-amyloid-PET scanning which we aim to perform in up to 50% of the subjects after 2 years. Repeat scanning will focus on those subjects with either a negative PET scan at baseline (with risk factors) or a borderline positive scan to understand the temporal dynamics of β-amyloid deposition in the earliest stages in terms of disease evolution and the negative predictive value in terms of diagnosis. Serial imaging will also facilitate subsequent treatment trials. For the future, monitoring the rate of accumulation in well characterized groups could pave the way to develop guidelines for treatment selection and monitoring in individual subjects and a step towards personalized medicine.
The project is going to start in October 2016 and will last 5 years.
Through engagement with regulators, the AMYPAD consortium will maximize the value of its findings for pharmaceutical companies, healthcare providers, and patients.