Neurodegeneration
Program Committee
Philip Scheltens (program leader)
Peter Heutink (program leader)
Common clinical cohorts:
Henk Berendse
Wiesje van der Flier
Research theme 1: Neuropathology and biomarker studies
Wilma van de Berg
Annemieke Rozemuller
Research theme 2: Neurogenetics and pathogenetic mechanisms
Guus Smit
Pieter Voorn
Research theme 3: NeuroImaging
Adriaan Lammertsma
Cees Stam
Research theme 4: New therapeutic approaches
Eric van Exel
Erik Scherder
Rationale
Neurodegenerative disorders pose a major burden on the health and well being of numerous individuals, on society as a whole as well as on the health care system in particular. In view of the strong increase of the ageing population, this burden will increase dramatically in the next decades. The present program deals with major neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s disease (AD), Frontotemporal dementia, vascular dementia, dementias with parkinsonism and Parkinson’s disease (PD), that together strongly contribute to disease burden and consume a major part of the health care budget in the Netherlands.
The uniqueness of this program as it is situated at the Neuroscience campus Amsterdam is the combined presence of large well defined patient cohorts that are followed over time and of which biosamples have been collected and stored in biobanks together with state of the art brain imaging and neurogenomics techniques as well as valid cellular and animal models. As such this program enables true translational research, from bench to bedside and back.
Executive Summary
This is a clinically oriented translational program. The main focus is to unravel the underlying often overlapping pathofysiologic substrates of the common neurodegenerative disorders with AD and PD as their most well known representatives. The classical forms of AD and PD are considered distinct diseases, but many patients show a large overlap in symptoms, pathology and genetic findings. To enable targeted drug therapies an adequate characterisation of the underlying pathology at protein level is needed. It has become clear that on the molecular level there are common denominators and that an integrated joint approach on neurodegenerative disease holds the best promise for unravelling the pathogenesis of these disorders. The translational component will be evidenced in a bidirectional approach by using biomarkers and clinical information from patients to guide the preclinical program and findings from cellular and genetic research can immediately be tested and validated in clinical samples.
Common goals of this program are:
- to further unravel the, possibly in part common, neuronal substrates, neuropathological and pathogenetic mechanisms of the above mentioned disorders;
- to develop early, preferably even presymptomatic, diagnostic markers;
- to develop novel therapeutic approaches.
- To develop reliable markers for disease progression and therapy response
Evaluating the current available resources, there is extensive expertise from clinic, patient cohorts (also collaborative with other centers), phenotyping (including imaging), biomarkers, (early)diagnostic markers, neuroanatomy/pathology, transcriptomics/proteomics, gene finding, functional characterization, cellular, animal models and therapeutic approaches. We have constructed the translational research plan according to disease specific lines:
- Alzheimer (and related forms of dementia) - 13 projects
- Parkinson - 7 projects
- FrontoTemporal Lobar Degeneration - 5 projects
- Normal Aging - 2 projects
Future perspectives
After the kick off of the Neuroscience Campus Amsterdam in depth discussions need to be carried out with possible other participants present at the campus to investigate whether other projects are envisaged and realistic. In addition current projects will need to be scrutinized for their value in creating translational connections between campus labs. We expect this will take a year after which a refined research plan will be presented.
