Revolutionising Precision Medicine: PROMINENT Project will Enhance Diagnosis and Treatment of Neurodegenerative Diseases
Today, partners of the PROMINENT project announced the launch of a collaborative pan-European initiative funded through the Innovative Health Initiative (IHI). PROMINENT will create a digital platform for precision medicine to improve the diagnosis and treatment of neurodegenerative disease and co-morbidities. The overriding objective is to assist clinicians with individualised decision support in the evaluation of patients with suspected cognitive impairment.
PROMINENT is a public-private partnership funded by the IHI for a period of five years. The PROMINENT consortium brings together experts in neurodegenerative diseases and clinical neuroscience, artificial intelligence (AI), health economics, and patient advocacy. Project partners also include some of Europe's leading medical centres for the diagnosis and treatment of cognitive disorders.
Alzheimer Europe will be leading the communication, stakeholder engagement and public involvement activities in PROMINENT.
Improving the management of Alzheimer's disease
The first application for PROMINENT will be in Alzheimer's disease (AD), which encompasses the Alzheimer's disease continuum and affects over 20 million people in Europe. The prevalence of AD is expected to double over the next three decades. However, diagnosis and management are challenging due to the high incidence of comorbidities, such as cardiovascular and psychiatric conditions. By taking into account individual differences in patients' genes, lifestyles and clinical parameters, precision medicine has the potential to dramatically improve diagnosis, prognosis and treatment of AD.
"With a large ageing population and an ambition to maintain good health into the higher ages, Europe has a great need for precision medicine systems that can support clinicians with diagnosing and treating neurodegenerative conditions, and provide support to patients and their care partners." said Principal Investigator, Dr. Linus Jönsson. "PROMINENT will leverage digital tools and biomarkers together with advanced analytics to increase the accuracy of AD diagnosis and prognosis, paving the way for the introduction of new health technologies that will improve the lives of patients and care partners."
The PROMINENT digital platform
A core outcome for PROMINENT will be its digital platform, which will leverage existing tools for AI-based image analysis developed by project co-Principal Investigator, Dr. Jyrki Lötjönen from Combinostics. Building on these tools, PROMINENT will develop an open, interoperable platform capable of interacting with a wide range of systems to integrate multi-modal diagnostic data.
Powered by innovative prognostic and diagnostic algorithms, the PROMINENT platform will enable personalised prediction of patient-relevant outcomes as well as evidence-based recommendations for clinical management. Patients and care partners will receive understandable, personalised information on their brain health, and clinicians will benefit from these novel decision support tools that will guide them on the optimal diagnostic and therapeutic pathways.
Enabling real-world implementation
Beyond establishing a digital platform for precision medicine, PROMINENT will pave the way for implementation in healthcare systems across Europe, using established co-creation approaches to meaningfully involve clinicians, patients and care partners along with representatives of regulatory agencies, health technology assessment bodies (HTA), and payers.
A prospective evaluation study led by the University of Cologne will assess how well the decision support system provides relevant, actionable information to clinicians, patients and care partners. Detailed feedback from interviews and surveys will facilitate iterative improvements to the PROMINENT system and user experience. A prospective validation study (led by Region Stockholm) will determine the diagnostic and prognostic accuracy of the platform, and assess clinical confidence in diagnosis before and after accessing the PROMINENT platform.
With new disease-modifying therapies for AD on the horizon, there is a real need to support the introduction and optimal use of these novel drugs, and provide evidence for regulators, HTA bodies, and payers. PROMINENT will rise to this challenge by supporting clinicians to ensure adherence with appropriate use guidelines, and by developing a framework for real-world evidence generation, delivering measurable improvements in clinical diagnosis, patient management, uptake of novel health technologies, and cost-effectiveness.
"Precision medicine is the future of healthcare, and with the PROMINENT project, we are taking a significant step forward in enhancing the diagnosis and treatment of neurodegenerative diseases. Our goal is to provide clinicians with individualised decision support and improve patient outcomes through personalised prediction models as well as evidence-based recommendations. With the collaboration of our esteemed partners, we are confident that PROMINENT will transform the way we approach cognitive impairment and ultimately improve the lives of patients across Europe."—Dr. Linus Jönsson, Professor of Health Economics at Karolinska Institutet, PROMINENT Principal Investigator.
The PROMINENT project has a budget of EUR 11,069,750 from which EUR 6,069,750 is funded by IHI and EUR 5,000,000 is committed by the contributing partners.
Partners:
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Karolinska Institutet
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Combinostics Oy
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Combinostics US Inc.
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Synapse Research Management Partners Sl
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Alzheimer Europe
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Region Stockholm
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BioArctic AB
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Klinikum der Universität Zu Köln
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IHE, Institutet för Hälso- och Sjukvårdsekonomi
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Fundacio Barcelonabeta Brain Research Center
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CHU Hopitaux de Bordeaux
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Univerzitetni Klinicni Center Ljubljana
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University of Eastern Finland
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Stichting Vumc
Follow the project on Twitter @IHI_PROMINENT to stay up-to-date.
About the Innovative Health Initiative
The Innovative Health Initiative (IHI) aims to translate health research and innovation into real benefits for patients and society, and ensure that Europe remains at the cutting edge of interdisciplinary, sustainable, patient-centric health research. Health research and care increasingly involve diverse sectors. By supporting projects that bring these sectors together, IHI will pave the way for a more integrated approach to health care, covering prevention, diagnosis, treatment, and disease management. IHI is a partnership between the European Union and European industry associations representing the pharmaceutical, medical technology, biotechnology, digital health and vaccine industries, namely COCIR, EFPIA (including Vaccines Europe), EuropaBio, and MedTech Europe. IHI's total budget is EUR 2.4 billion. Half of this comes from Horizon Europe, the EU's research and innovation programme. The IHI industry partners have committed EUR 1 billion to IHI, and a further EUR 200 million can be committed by other organisations that decide to become Contributing Partners.
More information can be found at https://www.ihi.europa.eu/
Acknowledgement
This project is supported by the Innovative Health Initiative Joint Undertaking (JU) under grant agreement No 101112145. The JU receives support from the European Union's Horizon Europe research and innovation programme and COCIR, EFPIA, EuropaBio MedTech Europe, Vaccines Europe, BioArctic AB and Combinostics Oy.
Disclaimer
Funded by the European Union, the private members, and those contributing partners of the IHI JU. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the aforementioned parties. Neither of the aforementioned parties can be held responsible for them.
Principal Investigator:
Linus Jönsson
Karolinska Institutet
Co-Principal Investigator:
Jyrki Lötjönen
Combinostics
jyrki.lotjonen@combinostics.com
More information:
www.alzheimer-europe.org/news/ … gnosis-and-treatment
Provided by Alzheimer Europe