Tag Archives: European

Today the Lancet Neurology Commission released a major report detailing the state of research and patient care for Alzheimer´s disease and other dementias and providing recommendations for the future. The conclusion: A concerted effort and long-term economic commitment are critical to meeting the global challenge of Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias.

The comprehensive report, which was the result of a collaborative effort between more than 30 leading researchers from around the world, will also be presented to the European Parliament Commissioners today in Brussels.

The Lancet Neurology Commission, initiated by Lancet editors, is led by Professor Bengt Winblad of the Center for Alzheimer Research at the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden. Winblad is also a member of the JPND Scientific Advisory Board and was the coordinator of BIOMARKAPD, a JPND project on Biomarkers for Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease. Three other members of the JPND Scientific Advisory Board, Prof. Martin Knapp (United Kingdom), Prof. Bruno Dubois (France), and Prof. Philip Scheltens (Netherlands), as well as the Chair of the JPND Management Board, Prof. Philippe Amouyel, participated as experts in this report. The commission was formed with the aim of providing expert recommendations and information to politicians and policymakers about Alzheimer´s disease and related dementias.

The report encompasses the fields of health economics, epidemiology, prevention, genetics, biology, diagnosis, treatment, care and ethics. To reduce the burden of dementia, the commission advocates that public governmental agencies form large multinational partnerships with academic centres and pharmaceutical companies to deploy capital resources and share risk.

“To defeat Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias, united actions are needed, not only within research, but also within the political arena on all levels,” said Winblad. “My hope is that our work will stimulate increased national and international collaboration.”

Alzheimer’s, the most common form of dementia, accounts for approximately 60 percent of cases. The most important risk factor is age, and as life expectancy increases, the number of people with dementia is also expected to rise. In 2015, almost 47 million individuals around the world were estimated to be affected. By 2030, the number is expected to reach 75 million. By 2050, up to 131 million people are expected to be burdened by the disease. So far, no treatment is available to effectively halt or reverse the disease.

Alzheimer’s disease and related disorders are one of the major targets of JPND, which as the largest global research initiative aimed at tackling the challenge of neurodegenerative diseases is cited in the report as an example of the sort of action needed to make meaningful progress. “To speed up progress even more, ” the report asserts, “this global collaboration must be extended to even more countries.”

For Winblad, the onus is now on governments to take action — and quickly: “What we need now is for the politicians to realise that this is a growing problem that already costs society tremendous amounts of money,” he said. “We need investments of resources in research in all areas involved in this disease, to find better drugs, but also to improve compassionate care and prevention.”

The Active and Assisted Living Programme (AAL), which aims to improve the conditions of life for older adults through the use information and communication technology (ICT), has opened its 2016 call, Living well with dementia.

The objective of the call is to advance the contribution of ICT to integrated solutions that enable the well being of people living with dementia and their communities, including their family, caregivers, neighbourhood, service providers and care system. The call aims to support innovative, transnational and multi-disciplinary collaborative projects with a clear route to market and added value for the different types of end users. A key priority underlying this challenge will be to bring together technologies and services to create ICT-based solutions addressing the specific aspirations and challenges of people living with dementia and their communities.

The submission deadline is 26 May 2016, 5PM CET. To learn more about the call or to register to watch the live webcast on 8 March, please visit the AAL website.

Alzheimer Europe and Alzheimerforeningen are now accepting abstracts for the 26th Alzheimer Europe Conference, which will take place from October 31 – November 2, 2016, in Copenhagen, Denmark.

Abstracts for oral and poster presentations can be submitted in the following categories:

Dementia-friendly society – Involving people with dementia, Perceptions and image of dementia, Art and dementia, Dementia-friendly communities
Policies and Strategies – Dementia strategies, Legal issues, Care financing, Minority groups
Innovative care – Hospital care, Post-Diagnostic support, Residential care, End-of-life care
Medical aspects – Timely diagnosis, Risk factors and prevention of dementia, Behavioural and psychological aspects of dementia, Treatment of dementia

The call for abstracts will close on April 30, 2016. More information is available on their website.

The ERA-NET NEURON has launched a new call for research proposals that will aim to address key questions relating to external insults to the central nervous system. These insults often cause permanent disability and constitute a heavy burden for patients and their families.

The call will accept proposals ranging from understanding basic mechanisms of disease through proof-of-concept clinical studies in humans to neurorehabilitation. The focus of the call is on primary physical insults to the central nervous system, i.e. Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) and Spinal Cord Injury (SCI). The call covers acute traumatic events over the entire lifespan.

Excluded from this call are research projects on haemorrhage and hypoxia. Moreover, research on psychological/mental consequences of insults, including stress-related disorders (e.g. post-traumatic stress disorder), is not part of the present call. Research on neurodegenerative disorders will not be eligible in the present call.

The ERA-NET NEURON funding organizations particularly aim to promote multi-disciplinary work and to encourage translational research proposals that combine basic and clinical approaches, for the benefit of the affected patients.

The deadline for pre-proposal submission is March 14, 2016.

Visit the ERA-NET NEURON website to learn more about the call and to apply.

The Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI) has launched a new call for research proposals that will aim to accelerate the development of medicines in a number of key areas, including neurological disorders.

The Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease topic of the call focuses on better understanding how the protein tangles found in both diseases spread through the brain, with the ultimate goal of establishing new drug targets.

The IMI initiative, a partnership between the European Union and the pharmaceutical industry association EFPIA, aims to stimulate the development of safer and more effective medicines.

Other topics in the call, known as IMI 2 – Call 7, include safety, pain, cancer, eye diseases, and big data. Call 7 has a budget of €46.8 million from IMI, which will be matched by €46.8 million from the EFPIA companies in the projects. The submission deadline for this call is March 17, 2016.

IMI simultaneously launched a second call, known as IMI 2 – Call 8, for research proposals on Ebola and related diseases.

Visit the IMI website to learn more about the call topics and to apply.

The EU Joint Programme – Neurodegenerative Disease Research (JPND) has announced a rapid-action call inviting leading scientists in the field to bring forward novel approaches that will enhance the use of brain imaging for neurodegenerative disease research.

Imaging techniques such as MR, PET and EEG mapping have brought about a dramatic improvement in the understanding of neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease. In recent years, access to cutting-edge imaging technologies and platforms has expanded, and advances have been made in the harmonisation of acquisition procedures across scanners and vendors. However, fully capitalising on the use of brain imaging technologies for neurodegeneration research will require the development of new methodologies and the ability to achieve image acquisition and analysis at scale and at the global level.

The aim of the call is to establish a limited number of transnational working groups to address the key challenges facing the use of new and innovative brain imaging techniques in neurodegenerative disease research. The working groups will be community-led and will establish ‘best practice’ guidelines and/or methodological frameworks to overcome these barriers. Each working group can bid up to €50,000 for the support of its activities, which are expected to run for a maximum of 9 months.

According to Professor Philippe Amouyel, Chair of the JPND Management Board:

“JPND recognises that state-of-the-art brain imaging techniques are a vital resource for neurodegenerative disease research. However, achieving scalability for these technologies poses new challenges. For this reason, we’ve launched a rapid-action call inviting international research teams to address the most urgent issues in harmonisation and alignment in neuroimaging. The establishment of effective new guidelines and methodological frameworks will represent a critical step toward the full exploitation of brain imaging in neurodegenerative disease research.”

The following neurodegenerative diseases are included in the call:

Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias
Parkinson’s disease and PD‐related disorders
Prion diseases
Motor neuron diseases
Huntington’s disease
Spinocerebellar ataxia (SCA)
Spinal muscular atrophy (SMA)

Proposals must be submitted by 23:59H C.E.T. on March 10, 2016.

For more information about the call, please click here.

A genetic study of over 173,000 individuals has confirmed that the TREM2 amino-acid-substitution mutation R47H increases the risk of Alzheimer disease in people of European descent.

Several studies have reported the TREM2 R47H mutation to be a risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease (AD), but the magnitude of this mutation’s role in AD and other neurodegenerative diseases has been far from clear.

“The effect size estimates varied widely across datasets,” says lead author of this study, Christina Lill University of Lübeck, Germany.

The results, published in the journal Alzheimer’s & Dementia, suggest the mutation contributes through tau dysfunction.

In a guest post, Prof. Elena Cattaneo, University of Milan, Italy reports in EUROSTEMCELL on recent research that examines how a particular type of cell develops in the human brain, and how studies like this fit into the overall picture of research collaboration and funding, in Italy and in Europe.

The striatum is the area of the brain that degenerates in Huntington’s disease (HD) – a neurodegenerative disorder that as of today, has no cure. It took 4 years of continuous experiments of 17 researchers from 6 groups in 2 European countries to understand more about how cells develop in the striatum. This work, led by the group at the University of Milan, was published in Nature Neuroscience on 10 Nov 2014.

According to Prof. Cattaneo, “this kind of study is important because we need to understand more about how our tissues and our cells develop in order to understand why they degenerate. This will also allow us to build strategies to slow the advancement or prevent the onset of disease“.

“We identified how striatal neurons mature in the human brain, at a molecular and functional level. These neurons are the ones that die in Huntington’s disease. During the earlier stages of the development of the brain, stem cells are found in an area just around the ventricles. Stem cells destined to generate the striatal neurons possess an identifying molecular code, which then turns into a second code acquired by the cells when they move from this location en route to the striatum. Then, a third identifying code is acquired when the cells finally reach the striatum, where they will remain. For the first time, we could study these 3 steps in development, working with post mortem tissue”

Source: EuroStemCell website