Welcome to the AMYPAD newsletter!
Hello everyone,
I thought I would look back to this time last year with a view to highlighting the tremendous progress our AMYPAD teams have made since then.
We are now in Year 4 of our program and the progress we have made over the last 12 months has been hugely impressive. In February 2019, our Diagnostic and Patient Management Study (DPMS) had recruited approximately 170 research participants. As of the 25th February 2020, we have 729 participants recruited with 490 of these scanned with amyloid PET. All our eight sites are actively recruiting with centres focusing on cases with subjective cognitive decline (SCD) and dementia to make sure we have equal representation of clinical subtypes in our study.
Our Prognostic and Natural History Study (PNHS) has also made huge strides forward compared to last year when in February 2019 we had only scanned 20 cases at the VUmc. We now have 512 subjects recruited and over 372 scans collected to date. Our AMYPAD PNHS not only has all the Wave 1 centres initiated but we have also welcomed a further 11 European centres to the study too. Well done to Isadora Lopes and Ifrah Iidow who have worked through multiple steps facilitating ethics, regulatory, radiation safety submissions plus contracts and approvals as well as various certification and site set up visits. Good job!
AMYPAD have recently been out and about at the Human Amyloid Imaging conference in Miami where it was great to meet other collaborators and fellow scientists. Isadora gave a well-received oral talk on reducing sample sizes and additionally five posters from others AMYPAD members (Santi, Fiona, Richard, Lyduine and Gemma) were presented.
So in summary, we are looking very much forward to a productive rest of 2020 as we strive to finish recruitment of our DPMS and increase our numbers in the PNHS.
This electronic newsletter will be published quarterly and be accessible via the AMYPAD website (www.amypad.eu). In this issue, you will find interviews with two AMYPAD collaborators, the highlighted achievements over the past year as well as AMYPAD’s participation in relevant events.
Please don’t hesitate to contact myself Gill Farrar (gill.farrar@ge.com) or Frederik Barkhof (f.barkhof@vumc.nl) if you have any queries or further questions on our AMYPAD activities.
Gill Farrar
AMYPAD Project co-lead
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