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29 May | 2018

Two Catalan participants attend the General Assembly of the EPAD project

Encarna and Montserrat, participants of the Alfa Study and the European Prevention of Alzheimer's Preventia Consortium (EPAD), attended the General Assembly of the project, which took place from May 23rd to 25th in Amsterdam, Netherlands. Both traveled together with a team of researchers from the Barcelonaβeta Brain Research Center that participated in the different working groups of the European project.

For the first time, the meeting was attended by representatives of the committee of participants from Barcelona, Edinburgh and Amsterdam. All of them highlighted the good treatment received in their respective centers, as well as their willingness and confidence in research to prevent Alzheimer's disease.

The General Assembly of EPAD has focused especially this year on the opening of new centers to increase the recruitment of participants, and on the strategies to follow to improve recruitment and maintain it. Likewise, there has also been talks about the future expansion of the program, in a session led by the scientific director of the Alzheimer's Prevention Program of the BBRC, Dr. José Luis Molinuevo, who also participated in a debate together with other principal investigators of the project.

On the other hand, Gemma Salvadó, predoctoral researcher of the BBRC, presented new results of the project, shared with AMYPAD, on Positron Emission Tomography (PET) tests, and was part of a session dedicated to the program of training EPAD Academy. The meeting was also attended by Dr. Karine Fauria, scientific manager of the BBRC, and Dr. Juan Domingo Gispert, head of the Neuroimaging group of the BBRC, in order to participate in different working groups.

EPAD currently has more than 700 participants recruited in 17 centers throughout Europe, of which more than 150 are from the BBRC in Barcelona. The project involves 38 organizations from academia, the pharmaceutical industry and patient associations, with the aim of expanding knowledge about the preclinical phase of Alzheimer's, and thus accelerate the discovery of drugs that can prevent the disease.

The project is funded by grant number 115736 of the Innovative Medicines Initiative, which is a joint initiative of the research and innovation program of the European Commission Horizon 2020 and the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations (EFPIA).