On 23-25 May, the EPAD (European Prevention of Alzheimer’s Dementia) project General Assembly (GA) meeting took place in Amsterdam, The Nerthelands, under the banner “How to Assure Sustainability?”. EPAD is co-coordinated by Craig Ritchie, Professor of the Psychiatry of Ageing at the University of Edinburgh and Dr Serge Van der Geyten, Director for Neuroscience External Affairs at Janssen Pharmaceutica.

On the third day, the EPAD consortium gathered for an EPAD Academy session, who welcomed oral presentations of nine young researchers. The project launched in 2017 its EPAD Academy that is aiming to efficiently leverage EPAD resources to foster and develop academic research capacity and output in Alzheimer’s disease (AD) across Europe for maximum global impact.

The session was a great opportunity for presenting AMYPAD:

• The added value of quantitative amyloid PET in determining Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) dementia risk: the AMYPAD Prognostic and Natural History Study (Isadora Lopes Alves, VUmc)
• Assessing Amyloid Pathology in Cognitively Normal Subjects using [18F]Flutemetamol PET (Lyduine Collij, VUmc)
• Optimized coffee-break protocols for quantitative [18F]flutemetamol and [18F]florbetaben studies (Fiona Heeman, VUmc)
• Performance of supratentorial white matter reference regions for longitudinal quantification of [18F]Flutemetamol PET scans (Gemma Salvadó, BBRC)
• Neuroimaging in early stage Alzheimer’s disease (Silvia Ingala, VUmc)

During the event, a poster session was also organised. Isadora Lopes Alves from VUmc (pictured) presented a poster titled “Event-based modeling of the temporal ordering of regional β-amyloid deposition in the brain”

Moreover, on April 17^th, the EPAD Academy held its fifth webinar, out of 14 scheduled for 2018. The AMYPAD project coordinator Frederik Barkhof gave an online masterclasses on the latest developments of the Imaging in Alzheimer’s disease. If you are curious and interested to sit in on Frederik’s webinar, the recording is available on the EPAD You Tube channel here.

To keep up to date with EPAD’s progress follow @IMI_EPAD on Twitter, visit https://fr-fr.facebook.com/IMIEPAD/ and visit the website http://ep-ad.org/.

The EPAD project has received support from the Innovative Medicines Initiative Joint Undertaking under grant agreement n° 115736, resources of which are composed of financial contribution from the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) and EFPIA companies’ in kind contribution.