We are writing to you with the latest news from the AMYPAD project.

Welcome back everyone to the AMYPAD project as the summer draws to a close. I hope you all managed to get a break in some form or other in these unusual times.
 
Both of our studies have been impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. The Diagnostic and Patient Management Study (DPMS) currently has over 780 patients recruited and we will still aim to close at around 900 in this study. We enrolled very few subjects in April, May and June although we did pick up in July but then dipped in August because of the summer holiday period. Hopefully things will get back to a more normal rate of recruitment in the autumn period. Similarly the Prognostic and Natural History Study (PNHS) has now reached 600 subjects consented as well as 6 cohorts actively participating to bring their subjects in. The teams are also working closely with our informatics partner Aridhia to integrate data from all the cohorts.
 
Despite the recent low recruitment into both studies, the AMYPAD teams have continued to analyse images from external cohorts as well as starting to analyse images from both AMYPAD studies. We were excited to be chosen for a ‘Featured Research Session’ at the virtual Alzheimer’s Association International Conference (AAIC) in July with our topic covering ‘The value of amyloid PET beyond dichotomization’ and presentations from Isadora Lopes Alves, Lyduine Collij, Santi Bullich and José Luis Molinuevo.
We also have an active ‘Centiloid working group’ chaired by Chris Buckley with the aim to further understand the value and intricacies of the Centiloid method which aims to normalise quantitative measures across amyloid PET tracers.
 
In addition, the AMYPAD team have formed a very fruitful collaboration with Dr San Won Seo and his research group from the Samsung Medical Centre (Seoul, Korea) and he has kindly allowed us access to his cohort where normal and dementia subjects have been scanned with both flutemetamol and florbetaben so this is an interesting data set to further investigate.
 
Over the coming months we are planning our annual General Assembly meeting as we enter into our fifth and final year of AMYPAD so the discussions will be focusing on analysis plans, pivotal publications and completing final milestones as well as addressing topics such as data access and sustainability.
 
So we have a busy year ahead with much to complete in terms of both subjects recruitment and data analysis as well as the unenviable task of writing everything up to demonstrate to our funding source at IMI the value that our project has contributed to dementia research.
 
This electronic newsletter will be published quarterly and be accessible via the AMYPAD website (www.amypad.eu). In this issue, we present you the AAIC conference where AMYPAD was prominently featured and an update on recruitment. In addition, you can also get to know two AMYPAD collaborators, Santigo Bullich and Annebet Leeuwis who share some of their expectations with us.
 
Please don’t hesitate to contact myself Gill Farrar (gill.farrar@ge.com) or Frederik Barkhof (f.barkhof@vumc.nl) if you are interested to learn more about AMYPAD.

You can download the newsletter here.
 

Gill Farrar
AMYPAD Project co-lead