The US Alzheimer’s Drug Discovery Foundation (ADDF) has announced up to US$2m of funding for a collaborative research initiative led by Alzheimer’s Research UK to develop a digital toolkit of apps and wearables to detect the earliest stage of Alzheimer’s.
The funding awarded to the Early Detection of Neurodegenerative Diseases (EDoN) initiative is part of the ADDF Diagnostics Accelerator (DxA), which challenges the global research community to innovate new diagnostic technologies for dementia and Alzheimer’s.
Early detection of neurodegenerative diseases
EDoN is a project led by Alzheimer’s Research UK which combines global experts in data science, digital technology and neurodegeneration. It monitors sleep, fine motor control, heart rate, speech and brain activity to develop digital signs of early disease that could improve dementia research efforts in the future.
EDoN aims to streamline efforts to collect, integrate and analyse a wealth of digital, clinical and health data to help identify the disease earlier.
The data can be compiled to build machine learning models to identify patterns of early disease-specific to different neurodegenerative diseases.
The project aims to incorporate the best measures into an inexpensive and easy-to-use digital toolkit. This will likely be a combination of apps, wearable or mobile devices and software.
Funding and research
The funding will allow the team of researchers to collect digital data from over 600 people who are currently involved in two population-based cohort studies in Australia.
The participants are asked to wear a headband to measure sleep and brain activity, an activity tracker to register heart rate and physical activity.
This will be combined with a smartphone app that measures cognitive function such as speech or fine motor control. This data will be compared to clinical data from the cohorts to help researchers identify the digital measures linked to biological changes.
Participants in the study include people with different levels of Alzheimer’s disease, those with mild cognitive impairment and cognitively healthy volunteers. This will allow researchers to view a wide range of responses across a spectrum of cognitive health. They will follow the individuals involved over time identifying any changes that occur.
Diagnostics accelerator
The diagnostics Accelerator provides funding to increase the development of affordable and accessible diagnostic tools and biomarkers for the disease. The initiative currently funds over 30 projects around the world including a number of blood tests and eye scanning techniques. These tests monitor the early biological changes due to Alzheimer’s disease.
These changes may be undetectable to the human eye but may be picked up by digital technologies.
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Dr Zoe Kourtzi, scientific director and chair of EDoN Steering Committee, said: “Around the world, there are 50 million people living with dementia — a number that is only set to rise. Global efforts to tackle the diseases that cause dementia are currently hamstrung by our inability to detect them early enough. Digital technology holds enormous potential to put us on the front foot when it comes to identifying diseases like Alzheimer’s earlier, and EDoN is working to make that happen.
“Accurate and cost-effective tools for detecting early neurodegenerative disease will provide essential insight into fundamental disease mechanisms, improve clinical diagnosis and enable existing and future interventions to be given earlier when they have the best possible chance of success.
“We are very excited to be working with the ADDF through the Diagnostics Accelerator. The funding will allow us to identify which digital measures have the most potential for early detection. The richer the data we can collect, and the more precise the algorithms we can develop, the faster we can move towards a digital toolkit that we hope will ultimately help doctors detect diseases like Alzheimer’s 10-15 years earlier than we can today.”
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