What is your current role on AMYPAD?

My role on AMYPAD is the Project Leader working closely with our Project Co-ordinator Professor Frederik Barkhof. We keep a broad overview of the key deliverables for each of the 6 workpackages and particularly pay attention to activities and interdependencies where there are multiple workpackages involved. Additionally we work closely with our colleagues in EPAD so that much of the overlap and common goals can be delivered without duplication. The project is at an exciting time, we kicked off at the beginning of October and are working hard to get the two clinical protocols associated with AMYPAD approved to enable us to start amyloid scanning. When we scan our first subjects it will be the culmination of many months work so will be cause for a big celebration.

What is your overall vision?

My overall vision for AMYPAD is for our consortium to be in a better position to understand the role of biomarkers much earlier in the dementia spectrum. I’m excited that the output of AMYPAD will be a triaging of subjects into therapeutic intervention studies, but I also have an interest in understanding the long term benefits of non-pharmacological intervention approaches and lifestyle changes which I believe will become a big part of managing people in the community at large.

What do you find most challenging about the project?

It’s my first role in managing an IMI project and I hadn’t appreciated the number of people and the wide variety of tasks involved in getting these public private partnerships off the ground. Saying that, it’s an immense privilege to be working with some of the world’s leading dementia specialists and there is clear optimism and ambition in making AMYPAD a success to benefit future generations as we all grow older.