We need tailored strategies for the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of Alzheimer’s disease. The PRISMA project wants to design a method to divide patients with Alzheimer's disease into different groups according to their particular disease cause.
PRISMA stands for Polygenic Risk scoring and deep-Immunophenotyping Strategy to Master Alzheimer's disease.
We are determined to push Alzheimer’s disease into the field of personalized medicine. By combining R&D and clinical care, we aim to create a unique ecosystem for Alzheimer clinical trials in Flanders, so that ultimately we’ll be able to provide effective treatments for everyone living with the disease. With PRISMA we will learn more about genetic risk, biomarkers, and the brain’s immune response to Alzheimer’s. Based on a wealth of data from >500 participants, we will build an innovative data platform where medical, genetic and research data can be linked and explored. Ultimately, this platform will allow us to recruit participants with similar disease-specific characteristics for new clinical trials and help us design personalized diagnostic tests and treatments for Alzheimer’s disease.
The central hypothesis of PRISMA is that an individual risk score that combines information about thousands of genes, called a polygenic risk score, could predict the disease process that leads to Alzheimer’s. Besides genetics, we will also study immune responses in cells that we obtain from the study participants and in blood samples.
Next to the classical dissemination of scientific research via publications in peer-reviewed journals, PRISMA specifically aims to create more accessible documentation, to create more awareness about Alzheimer's disease among a broader audience.
Up until now:
Mission Lucidity builds bridges between 200+ biomedical researchers, clinicians and nanoengineers, to drive the development of new technologies and tools to tackle the main hurdles in the neurodegeneration field. It is a unique multidisciplinary partnership between four research institutes in Leuven, Belgium:
Integrating data from silos to support real-time insights has become a nightmare, especially when supporting large and complex data sets. We enable enterprises to process, transform, secure, and orchestrate data from disparate data sources to deliver a trusted view enabling self-service knowledge discovery.
The Contract Research Organization (CRO) unit helps our clients assess the effects of their experimental Alzheimer’s Disease and other neurodegenerative disorders treatment in our proprietary mouse models. In addition, reMYND’s Drug Discovery and Development (DDD) unit has a phenotypic screening platform to discover disease-modifying small molecule treatments and their corresponding novel targets.
Hict is a dedicated healthcare consultancy company founded in 2004 that developed through its consultants a thorough expertise in health economics, market access, reimbursement, and business models for healthcare products & solutions. Extra expertise on strategy, process improvement and policy complete the overall offering of Hict. As a result, this wide offering allows Hict to bring in resources and competences on the level of valorisation and building out specific value models in the early-phase of a product evolution. This will allow the consortium to benefit from the early insights of the value model and assure, through market analysis and policy impact in early stage, the right product focus and market fit.
The Flemish Agency for Innovation & Entrepreneurship (VLAIO) offers dedicated grants for interdisciplinary cooperative research (ICON) to supports translational research with clear economic and social added value for Flanders.
What works for one person is not necessarily the best solution for someone else. We envision a future where doctors will diagnose or treat their patients in an evidence-based but personalized way: starting from information on an individuals genetic make-up, their medical data and images, but also environmental or lifestyle factors.
With the ICON call for personalized medicine, VLAIO wants to invest approximately EUR 16 million in innovative projects that develop new medical solutions tailored to the individual needs of each patient. PRISMA is one out of the first four projects to be approved.
