An important new study of Alzheimer's disease hopes to use information about the ageing brain in order to improve treatment, writes Dick Ahlstrom.
Scientists, doctors and industry have joined forces in a unique initiative to combat Alzheimer's disease. The goal is to bring research discoveries into the treatment of patients as quickly as possible.
This new collaboration involving Trinity College Dublin, NUI Galway, St James's Hospital Dublin and pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) has been made possible by €14.6 million in funding provided by GSK and by IDA Ireland.
While Alzheimer's disease is the immediate target, the five-year project has a much broader remit, explains the principal investigator of the project, Trinity's Prof Shane O'Mara.
"The focus is on neurodegenerative diseases, with specific application to Alzheimer's," he says. "We are going to look at the changes that take place in the brain as it ages."
The work at Trinity will be in its Institute of Neuroscience (TCIN) and Dr Michael Hogan in NUI Galway's Department of Psychology will lead the work in the west, explains Prof O'Mara. Another important element of the project, the clinical dimension, will be provided by St James's Hospital and GSK will also be committing scientists to the effort here.
"What we hope will happen is we will develop very powerful prognostic and diagnostic indicators for Alzheimer's disease," Prof O'Mara says. This in turn should help identify the best treatment options for individual patients with Alzheimer's and other neurodegenerative disorders. "This will be a new kind of research consortium, one concerned with 'translational' brain research," he says. "We want to take the knowledge we have about basic brain function and bring it into the clinic in as direct and rapid a fashion as possible." The initiative will open up opportunities for 12 postdoctoral researchers, three PhD students and two research nurses. There will also be seven GSK scientists based here, says Prof O'Mara.
The project will combine Trinity's expertise in the use of Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) in functional brain scanning with Galway's skills in analysing very fine changes in electroencephalogram (EEG) readings from patients. The goal is to be able to spot changes in cognitive function in individuals as they age. "There are very few places in the world that can put the two together," says Prof O'Mara.
"We are going to look at the relationship between changes in thinking, changes in behaviour and changes in MRI scans and combine them with the EEGs." This will be done with healthy controls, with individuals experiencing limited cognitive impairment and in patients known to have Alzheimer's disease.
The hope is that differences will arise in both MRI scans and EEGs for the three groups and these in turn will provide diagnostic potential for interpreting cognitive impairment.
"These are referred to as markers," says Prof O'Mara. They want to find targets for drug interventions as a way to at least halt cognitive decline and possibly to reverse it. "If we can find markers that are predictive and find them early enough we hope to halt the progression of the disease."
Anything that can achieve this would be extremely welcome given five million Europeans, 20,000 of them Irish, suffer with the disease. It affects one in 20 people over 65 but one in three people over 85.
Prof O'Mara believes that if specific drug therapies arise linked to the changes in brain function identified by the Trinity and Galway teams, then perhaps the one in three incidence in over-85s can be reduced to one in five or one in eight. "That would be a great achievement indeed."
He praised the involvement of GSK and its substantial investment in the basic research long before it is known whether the approach will work. "GSK has been extremely adventurous with us." The company has potential drugs but the basic research must be done to identify the markers to target.
"The neuroscience of the future will deliver new and innovative healthcare and this will be the outcome of the work of the clinician, the laboratory researcher and industry," Prof O'Mara says. "We have captured some of that future here in this world-leading collaboration."