Welcome to the AMYPAD newsletter!
Dear friends and colleagues,
Hope this newsletter finds you well. We are back at work again after summer holidays and it's hard to believe that our AMYPAD consortium is now in its last month of formal operation after six years of concerted efforts and collaboration. Recruitment on both AMYPAD studies is now completed and final data and images from sites are being collected and consolidated. We are proud to announce that in total AMYPAD has collected nearly 3,600 amyloid PET scans. Over 860 were from the Diagnostic and Prognostic Study (DPMS) with the remaining 2,700 coming from the Prognostic and Natural History Study (PNHS). This includes the collaborations with the other ten parent cohorts which have yielded an impressive 1,300 images to contribute to the PNHS body of images. The hard work to analyse all these scans is now ongoing as we move towards the close of the consortium.
AMYPAD also has just returned from the annual (but first face to face in 3 years) Alzheimer’s Association International Conference (AAIC), this year held in San Diego (US). We were fortunate to be awarded an online ‘Featured Research Session’ and had great feedback on both our technical and clinical presentations. Additionally, a number of posters were presented too. The utility of amyloid-PET remains of high interest particularly as we wait for the pivotal study outcomes of several anti-amyloid therapies to be presented at the next CTAD meeting in December.
Our final General Assembly is planned for the 22nd and 23rd of September in Amsterdam (Netherlands) and we have an exciting and wide-ranging agenda covering the analysis of both our studies as well as discussing future activities post-IMI funding period. One of the main points of interest too will be to explain our governance mechanisms for accessing the wealth of data that we have generated and how this will be maintained and made available going forwards.
From both Frederik and myself, we are extremely proud to have been associated with this high performing consortium and all the wonderful partners and collaborators we have made over the last six years.
In this issue, we present you the achievements of the past quarter, the AMYPAD latest papers and our participation in relevant events. In addition, you can also get to know three AMYPAD collaborators, Laura Stankeviciute, Alle Meije Wink and Valentina Garibotto, who share some of their experiences with us.
Gill Farrar
AMYPAD Project co-lead
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The 2022 Alzheimer’s Association International Conference (AAIC) took place from 31st July to 4th August as a hybrid event (online and in San Diego, US). This year, the conference attracted over 10,000 attendees and included more than 4,000 scientific presentations.
We were pleased that AMYPAD had the opportunity to hold a Featured Research Session. The session entitled ‘“Progressing the clinical and technical value of amyloid PET in dementia – the AMYPAD experience” was chaired by Lyduine Collij and Hugh Pemberton, and consisted of four oral presentations. In addition to the Featured Research Session, the AMYPAD team presented twelve posters on different aspects of the project. If you have missed the event, do not hesitate to download the AMYPAD posters on our website.
We would like to congratulate Agneta Nordberg, who received the Henry Wisniewski Lifetime Achievement Award. This award honors significant contributions to Alzheimer’s and dementia research, either through a single scientific discovery or a body of work.
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Meet some of the AMYPAD collaborators
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Interview with Laura Stankeviciute
"Within the AMYPAD WP4, I am responsible for the harmonization as well as data analysis of non-neuroimaging variables, particularly neuropsychiatric and cognitive variables, as well as lifestyle data. My personal interest lies in investigating the relationship between sleep and Amyloid PET, while additionally exploring the association between sleep and structural neuroimaging outcomes and cognition."
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Interview with Alle Meije Wink
"I am an assistant professor, trained as a computing scientist and have worked in medical image analysis ever since. I did my PhD in Groningen, Netherlands and postdocs in Cambridge and Hammersmith Hospital, both UK. At the Department of Radiology and Nuclear Medicine (Amsterdam University Medical Center), I work on methods development, image analysis and data management."
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Interview with Valentina Garibotto
"I am a nuclear medicine specialist and I have a long standing collaboration with Prof. Giovanni Frisoni. We have a common passion, understanding what happens in the brain with aging and why some individuals develop neurodegenerative disorders. Giovanni is the head of the memory center in the University Hospitals of Geneva and refers patients as well as study participants to our nuclear medicine division."
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Highlights of the past quarter
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AMYPAD announces Last Patient Out in its Prognostic Study
The members of the Amyloid Imaging to Prevent Alzheimer’s Disease (AMYPAD) project have announced the completion of the last patient visit in its Prognostic and Natural History Study (PNHS). All sites have completed the recruitment and scanning of participants, which represents an important milestone.
The study recruited participants from various European parent cohorts of similar characteristics. The main and original parent cohort was the European Prevention of Alzheimer’s Dementia ( EPAD) due to the inherent collaborative framework between the two projects. With this EPAD partnership, the PNHS study was active in a total of 17 sites across 7 European countries. In addition to EPAD, there were 9 other Parent Cohorts actively recruiting into AMYPAD.
On 30 April, the recruitment was formally ended and the study succeeded in recruiting 1,321 participants. The final scans were performed in July and the Last Patient Out date was the 6th of July 2022. The number of prospective scans collected within AMYPAD PNHS is 1,419 (1,192 baseline and 227 follow-up). The non EPAD Parent Cohorts also shared their historical data and therewith the total number of scans in AMYPAD PNHS is over 2700.
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If you are interested to know more about the AMYPAD PNHS study including highlights and challenges, watch the interview with the PNHS clinical trial managers Ifrah Iidow and Ilona Bader.
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