From 17 to 18 January (Barcelona, Spain and online), partners from the ADIS project met for their biannual General Assembly meeting.
The “Early Diagnosis of Alzheimer’s Disease by Immune Profiling of Cytotoxic Lymphocytes and Recording of Sleep Disturbances” – short ADIS project – is a JPND-funded 1.3 million EUR three-year project, coordinated by Fraunhofer SCAI.
The goal of ADIS is to thoroughly characterise the role of peripheral blood cytotoxic lymphocytes as potential markers for the early prediction of Alzheimer’s disease, and to investigate the influence of digitally assessed sleep disturbances on these markers.
The project meeting kicked off with opening remarks by project coordinator Prof. Holger Fröhlich (Fraunhofer SCAI), as well as meeting host and project collaborator Raquel Sanchez-Valle, Head of the Neurology Department (Fundació Clínic per a la Recerca Biomèdica – FCRB) welcoming all participants and providing an overview of the agenda for the two-day meeting.
Next, Vanessa Lage-Rupprecht (Fraunhofer SCAI), provided an overview of the latest work with regard to project management and the progress in terms of reporting, noting that all of the tasks are on track and the recruitment process of participants has been finalised. Looking at the project timeline she highlighted that the partners are now halfway through the project and next steps will focus on the start of the sample processing workflow as well as the application of the algorithms and agent-based modelling to the data. The project will conclude in June 2025.
This was complemented by Christophe Bintener (Alzheimer Europe) with an overview of the work done for the dissemination and communication tasks of ADIS. Updates revolved around the website, project channels, an introductory project clip as well as interviews with project partners.
The following presentation was given by project collaborators Andrea Del Val and Neus Falgàs from FCRB where they provided an overview of the recruitment procedure, clinical data and biosample acquisition, ethics and approvals as well as external dissemination activities. Recruitment involved 75 participants (25 with mild cognitive impairment due to Alzheimer’s disease, 25 people who have dementia due to Alzheimer’s disease as well as 25 healthy control participants. Andrea then delved deeper into the characteristics of the participating groups and highlighted that they will submit abstracts for two upcoming conferences.
The next presentations focused on immune profiling that will be conducted by ImmunoBrain Checkpoint LTD given by Kuti Baruch as well as single cell sequencing that will be conducted. Project partners from the Fraunhofer ITEM in Regensburg will thoroughly characterize peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) derived from the samples and analyse their functional status. They will use comparative single-cell immune repertoire and transcriptome sequencing for this as explained by Stefan Kirsch.
The morning ended with a demonstration of ALTOIDA: a novel tablet-based digital biomarker to assess neurodegenerative diseases by PhD Adrià Tort from FCRB. ALTOIDA is part of the assessment battery that is used in the ADIS study.
This was followed by a lunch break, after which guest speaker Prof. David Bartrès-Faz (University of Barcelona) spoke about Brain Health determinants in advanced age and across the lifespan, which led to lively discussions with partners.
The afternoon then revolved all around agent-based modelling with a presentation by Liad Doniza from the Tel Aviv University, where he explained the system which is based on a definition of initial conditions as well as the application of the agent-based model itself (a process in which interactions of included values are calculated to learn about the amount of different cytokines and state/polarization of cells).
The partners then took a walk through Barcelona and met for a well-deserved dinner in the Gothic Quarter of Barcelona.
The second day kicked off with the second part of discussions focused on Artificial Intelligence and statistical modelling, with a focus on Fraunhofer SCAI’s work by Sophia Krix. Here, she gave an outline of the current status of work with regards to the modelling of Alzheimer’s disease datasets with Variational Autoencoder Modular Bayesian Networks (VAMBN), the modelling of sleep cycles and actigraphy data as well as the modelling of scRNA seq data and integration with the agent-based modelling.
Last but not least, Soraya Moradi-Bachiller (Alzheimer Europe) spoke about the consultations with the ADIS Advisory Board. The Board is comprised of five people (living with Mild Cognitive Impairment due to Alzheimer’s disease) from Spain who participate in Spanish consultations as well as members of the European Working Group of People with Dementia who participate in English consultations. Recent consultations focused on informed consent for primary research as well as for data and sample sharing, but also the values and challenges associated to an early Alzheimer’s disease diagnosis.
The meeting was then formally closed by Holger Fröhlich who thanked all attendees for their contributions and the constructive exchange.
After the meeting, Andrea and Neus provided some explanations about the ADIS study and their involvement. Have a look at our extended project clip:
