More than 7 million people live with dementia in the European Union1 (EU), and the number will double to 14 million people by 2050. Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is the most common cause of dementia and accounts for 60-80% of cases.2 Recently, new amyloid beta-directed antibodies that reduce the beta-amyloid plaques that typically accumulate in the brains of AD patients have received regulatory approval, providing new hope for treating the disease. However, these treatments are most effective in the early stages of the disease and, along with associated therapy monitoring, are costly, adding a financial burden to patients and healthcare systems.
As part of its corporate strategy, GE HealthCare is committed to building a comprehensive ecosystem across the neurology care pathway to personalize the AD patient journey. This approach supports the entire care area across diagnosis, therapy planning and delivery, and monitoring with the company’s comprehensive suite of products and solutions, including MR.
Recognizing the need for more personalized and predictive AD screening to improve the patient care pathway, GE HealthCare gathered different teams and business units within the organization to explore innovative solutions. Building on existing and new partnerships, GE HealthCare connected with several industrial and academic partners through the Innovative Health Initiative (IHI), a public-private partnership between the EU and European life science industry, sharing a joint vision finally emerging into the project proposal called PREDICTOM‡.
PREDICTOM is a consortium project that aims to develop an AI-screening platform to identify individuals at risk of developing AD. The €21 million project is funded by the industrial partners of the Innovative Health Initiative (IHI), such as GE HealthCare and Horizon Europe, the EU’s framework program for research and innovation. Led by Stavanger University Hospital in Norway, PREDICTOM will gather 25 partners from academia, business, civil society and hospitals across 15 countries, representing a significant, large-scale, industry-academia partnership. The project began on November 1, 2023 and runs through October 31, 2027. It unites medtech with pharma and taps into the diverse expertise within GE HealthCare, encompassing imaging, digital technologies and pharmaceutical diagnostics. It is one of the largest grants led/managed by GE HealthCare, the leading industrial partner in this consortium.
Bringing screening closer to the patient
The primary goal for PREDICTOM is to develop a screening platform for identifying people at risk of dementia, before the first clinical symptoms appear. It is believed that changes in the brain may begin a decade or more before clinical symptoms emerge.
While today PET imaging and analyses of cerebrospinal fluid are used to diagnose dementia, these techniques are costly, invasive and often performed once dementia is more advanced. Developing cost-effective, early biomarkers of AD can be a game-changer for this disease and those it affects. To accomplish this, the project will focus on bringing these biomarkers closer to the patient by enabling earlier testing and screening at home. With more than 55 million people worldwide afflicted with dementia today3 – a number that will further increase significantly – the financial and logistical requirements to screen this patient population in clinics or physician offices are enormous. Enabling early home screening will provide a scalable, cost-effective and more widely accessible method for evaluating this large patient cohort, which is particularly important considering over 60% of the 55 million people with dementia live in low- and middle-income countries.
GE HealthCare’s digital teams in Budapest, Hungary will spearhead development of a digital platform‡‡ that will aggregate patient data across different screening stages, including physiological, digital, biofluids and imaging data. The team, together with the PREDICTOM Consortium partners, will develop the required infrastructure and AI algorithms for the platform to analyze the enormous volume of data from all these biomarkers, much of it in varying formats (laboratory, cognitive testing, physiological, imaging, etc.) and generate risk assessments, early diagnoses and prognoses, which will lay the foundation for early detection and better, targeted treatment.
In addition to the data analytics and AI platform, the GE HealthCare Magnetic Resonance (MR) Research team based in Munich, Germany will work with clinical, academic and industrial partners from the PREDICTOM Consortium to identify the most relevant established and novel MR biomarkers combined with biofluids, digital and physiological biomarkers that may indicate early stage AD.
Industry-academia collaboration
More than 4,000 participants will be enrolled in PREDICTOM’s trial project. The samples will be based on a pool of people from previous projects by PROTECT UK, PROTECT Norway and Radar-AD, as well as people from the catchment area of other participating centers in Germany, France, Switzerland, Belgium and Spain.
Dag Aarsland, MD, PhD, Professor of Old Age Psychiatry at King’s College London and research lead at Stavanger University Hospital, is the scientific coordinator of the project. His research has focused on dementia and neuropsychiatric problems, including founding the Centre for Age-Related Disease at Stavanger University Hospital and leading the Parkinson Spectrum Memory Clinic, part of the South London and Maudsley NHS Health Trust.
For decades, GE HealthCare has collaborated in neuroscience research with King’s College London, particularly the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience (IoPPN). The center is at the forefront of imaging technology, equipped with SIGNA™ Premier and soon one of the strongest neuro research MR scanners available today, MAGNUS‡‡.
MR imaging provides important information regarding structure, microstructure, function and metabolism. Currently, structural MR imaging is most commonly used in AD clinical practice and research. Hippocampal atrophy in AD patients can be measured with high-resolution T1-weighted MR and is often utilized for clinical diagnosis of AD.
However, the power of MR for early AD diagnosis may lie in these other imaging capabilities beyond structural data, as the scientific community is investigating.4 GE HealthCare, along with the clinical partners in PREDICTOM, will investigate whether there are new biomarkers or features within the brain microstructure, function or metabolism that are specific to early diagnosis of AD. The group will also investigate whether recently developed artificial intelligence/deep-learning techniques in MR can enhance the robustness of the imaging data.
Backed by the funding from IHI, the clinical expertise of King’s College London and Stavanger University Hospital, and the collaboration with clinical, academic, civil-society, medtech and pharma industries led by GE HealthCare, PREDICTOM is poised to bring AD diagnosis closer to the patient, which could enable earlier diagnosis and potentially more precise treatments that may change the trajectory of this devasting disease.
‡This project has received funding from the IHI Joint Undertaking, under Grant Agreement nº 101132356. This Joint Undertaking receives support from the EU’s Horizon Europe research and innovation program, COCIR, EFPIA, EuropeaBio, MedTechEurope and Vaccines Europe. The content of this publication represents the view of the author only and is his/her sole responsibility: it cannot be considered to reflect the views of the European Commission. The European Commission does not accept responsibility for the use that may be made of the information it contains.
‡‡Technology in development that represents ongoing research and development efforts. These technologies are not products and may never become products. Not for sale. Not cleared or approved by the US FDA or any other global regulator for commercial availability. This article is about a prototype that is not the current technology in development and will not be commercialized.
References
- Alzheimer’s Association. What is Alzheimer’s Disease? Accessed on January 25, 2024. https://www.alz.org/alzheimers-dementia/what-is-alzheimers#:~:text=Alzheimer’s%20is%20the%20most%20common,%2D80%25%20of%20dementia%20cases.&text=Alzheimer’s%20is%20not%20a%20normal%20part%20of%20aging.
- World Health Organization. Dementia. Updated March 15, 2023. Accessed on January 25, 2024. https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/dementia
- Leocadi M, Canu E, Calderaro D, Corbetta D, Filippi M, Agosta F. An update on magnetic resonance imaging markers in AD. Ther Adv Neurol Disord. 2020 Sep 4;13:1756286420947986.
