The PROMINENT consortium is a public-private partnership funded by the IHI for a period of five years that brings together experts in neurodegenerative diseases and clinical neuroscience, artificial intelligence (AI), health economics, and patient advocacy. Project partners also include some of Europe’s leading medical centers for the diagnosis and treatment of cognitive disorders.
SYNAPSE and the Barcelonaβeta Brain Research Center (BBRC), research center of the Pasqual Maragall Foundation, are the two partners of the project in Spain.
SYNAPSE will contribute with the application of innovative project management tools, processes, and methodologies for an optimal strategic direction of the project.
The participation of SYNAPSE, who is also managing the NEURO Cohort initiative and the EHDEN project, it will represent a major opportunity for PROMINENT to access to an extraordinary amount of high-quality data. - Sandra Pla, COO SYNAPSE
In addition, the Barcelonaβeta Brain Research Center will contribute with the development and validation of prediction models and diagnostic algorithms for PROMINENT's digital platform, based on a combination of large-scale datasets.
The first application for PROMINENT will be in Alzheimer’s disease (AD), which affects over 20 million people in Europe. The prevalence of Alzheimer’s is expected to double over the next three decades. However, diagnosis and management are challenging due to the high incidence of comorbidities, such as cardiovascular and psychiatric conditions. By taking into account individual differences in patients’ genes, lifestyles and clinical parameters, precision medicine has the potential to dramatically improve diagnosis, prognosis and treatment of the disease.
“With a large ageing population and an ambition to maintain good health into the higher ages, Europe has a great need for precision medicine systems that can support clinicians with diagnosing and treating neurodegenerative conditions, and provide support to patients and their care partners”, said Principal Investigator, Dr Linus Jönsson. “PROMINENT will leverage digital tools and biomarkers together with advanced analytics to increase the accuracy of AD diagnosis and prognosis, paving the way for the introduction of new health technologies that will improve the lives of patients and care partners.”
A core outcome for the project will be its digital platform, which will leverage existing tools for AI-based image analysis developed by project co-Principal Investigator, Dr Jyrki Lötjönen from Combinostics. Building on these tools, PROMINENT will develop an open, interoperable platform capable of interacting with a wide range of systems to integrate multi-modal diagnostic data.
Powered by innovative prognostic and diagnostic algorithms, the platform will enable personalised prediction of patient-relevant outcomes as well as evidence-based recommendations for clinical management. Patients and care partners will receive understandable, personalised information on their brain health, and clinicians will benefit from these novel decision support tools that will guide them on the optimal diagnostic and therapeutic pathways.
Beyond establishing a digital platform for precision medicine, PROMINENT will pave the way for implementation in healthcare systems across Europe, using established co-creation approaches to meaningfully involve clinicians, patients, and care partners along with representatives of regulatory agencies, health technology assessment bodies (HTA), and payers.
A prospective evaluation study led by the University of Cologne will assess how well the decision support system provides relevant, actionable information to clinicians, patients, and care partners. Detailed feedback from interviews and surveys will facilitate iterative improvements to the PROMINENT system and user experience. A prospective validation study (led by Region Stockholm) will determine the diagnostic and prognostic accuracy of the platform, and assess clinical confidence in diagnosis before and after accessing the PROMINENT platform.
With new disease-modifying therapies for AD on the horizon, there is a real need to support the introduction and optimal use of these novel drugs, and provide evidence for regulators, HTA bodies, and payers. PROMINENT will rise to this challenge by supporting clinicians to ensure adherence with appropriate use guidelines, and by developing a framework for real-world evidence generation, delivering measurable improvements in clinical diagnosis, patient management, uptake of novel health technologies, and cost-effectiveness.
“Precision medicine is the future of healthcare, and with the PROMINENT project, we are taking a significant step forward in enhancing the diagnosis and treatment of neurodegenerative diseases. Our goal is to provide clinicians with individualised decision support and improve patient outcomes through personalised prediction models as well as evidence-based recommendations. With the collaboration of our esteemed partners, we are confident that PROMINENT will transform the way we approach cognitive impairment and ultimately improve the lives of patients across Europe.” - Dr Linus Jönsson, Professor of Health Economics at Karolinska Institutet, PROMINENT Principal Investigator.
The PROMINENT project has a budget of 11,069,750 € from which 6,069,750 € is funded by IHI and 5,000,000 € is committed by contributing partners.
Partners involved in the project:
Source: Press Release
The aim of PROMINENT is to create a platform for precision medicine in the diagnosis and treatment of neurodegenerative disease and co-morbidities. Therefore, it will represent the first application of the platform is in Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and other dementia disorders, with scalability to other neurodegenerative diseases and beyond.