MOPEAD: web recruitment gets underway for early detection of Alzheimer’s disease

GMV, as the sole technological partner of the H2020 clinical-scientific project MOPEAD (Models of Patient Engagement for Alzheimer's disease), has developed the portal which is now up and running for online recruitment of people who might be suffering from the early phases of Alzheimer’s disease.

This trailblazing project has the prime aim of setting up an Alzheimer’s early-diagnosis system on a Citizen Science model, under which anonymous citizens collaborate in the research. One of the project’s most groundbreaking aspects is the wide-ranging citizen participation underpinning the research: at least 2000 people with ages ranging from 65 to 85, from Germany, Sweden, Slovenia, Spain and the Netherlands, are recruited by means of intelligent algorithms and GMV-developed Big Data technology.

MOPEAD research will help to define new therapeutic interventions and to select the ideal people to take part in clinical trials for developing new medicines capable of checking or slowing down the disease. In the words of Mercè Boada, medical director of the foundation leading the project, Fundació ACE, and leading MOPEAD researcher, “identifying disease symptoms as soon and as efficiently as possible is key to our understanding of the neurodegenerative process and finding more effective treatment in the early stages of this dementia”.

Inmaculada Pérez Garro, GMV’s Health Manager, put it like this: “When dealing with a health problem of this dimension, technology enables us to improve research results by working with two key concepts: data and evidence”. To do so “we need to maximize the patient-recruitment effort and harmonize the data obtained from citizens themselves, health services, the industry, research … guaranteeing privacy and with the ongoing commitment of obtaining evidence”.

At present this disease is not detected until obvious symptoms come to light, such as memory loss (by which time neurons are dying off), even though actual onset may date from 10 to 15 years earlier. Early diagnosis would allow sufferers to take part in clinical trials to check the impairment rate while also giving family relatives more time to assimilate and prepare for the new situation.

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