The Alzheimer’s Association International Conference (AAIC) took place in London from 16 to 20 July. This world’s largest forum dedicated to advancing dementia science gathered international investigators, researchers, clinicians and care providers from the dementia research community. The congress gathered approximately 5,400 professional delegates including 1,000 students and 450 industry delegates. The event was divided in more than 90 sessions, 1,500 posters and 475 presentations.

The conference was also a great opportunity for presenting AMYPAD since the project featured prominently in a number of key communications:

• An AMYPAD Meet&Greet event was organised by GE Healthcare and Piramal on 17 July. There, Gill Farrar (GE Healthcare) introduced the project, followed by Nicola Raffa (Piramal) and Craig Ritchie (UEDIN) who presented the Diagnostic Utility and the Prognostic Natural History Studies. Frederik Barkhof (VUmc) led the interesting discussions and closed the session.
• AMYPAD was invited to join “The Imaging Dementia-Evidence for Amyloid Scanning” (IDEAS) forum lunch meeting on 18 July. The aim of this forum was to discuss the progress of the IDEAS-study and to introduce the three IDEAS correlative studies (ANGI, BHR, CARE-IDEAS) as well as another international new study regarding amyloid PET. For this purpose, AMYPAD was briefly presented by Giovanni Frisoni (Université de Geneve).
• The AMYPAD partner IXICO organised an expert symposium dedicated to Imaging and digital biomarkers in Alzheimer’s disease clinical development on 18 July. AMYPAD was well represented with two oral presentations: Frederik Barkhof started the session with a talk entitled “Introduction to the scientific and operational challenges in large scale amyloid imaging in AMYPAD” and Elisabetta Grecchi (IXICO) talked about the “Automated analysis of amyloid PET in AMYPAD”.
• Three posters focusing on the AMYPAD project were presented. These posters can be downloaded here.
  • Frederik Barkhof and Gill Farrar presented a high-level overview of the AMYPAD project with a poster entitled “AMYPAD: A European public-private partnership to investigate the value of b-amyloid brain scans as a diagnostic and therapeutic marker for Alzheimer’s disease”.
  • Juan Domingo Gispert (BBRC) presented a poster about the “Methodological and logistic strategies for a large multi-center b-amyloid PET European project: AMYPAD”. He mentioned the WP2 goals as well as results already obtained.
  • Giovanni Frisoni described the WP3 work in the form of a poster entitled “The AMYPAD-Dx controlled trial on the diagnostic value of amyloid PET”.

We also used the newly designed AMYPAD flyer to communicate about the project. It was distributed throughout the AMYPAD events at AAIC as well as at the booth and symposia of GE Healthcare and IXICO. If you are interested by our flyer, download it here.

In addition to the external meetings and presentations, WP3 also used the opportunity of AAIC to hold an Investigator Meeting on 14 July where the protocol of the Diagnostic Utility Study was presented and discussed. All 8 clinical centers that will participate in the study were represented, as well as participants from GE Healthcare, Piramal, IXICO and the Ethics team.

To access the detailed AAIC programme, please visit the AAIC2017 website here. 

More pictures on AMYPAD at AAIC2017 can be found here.