We are hugely excited to launch the TriBEKa consortium today at the Alzheimer’s Association International Conference in London. The Centre for Dementia Prevention is one of the three pillars that form the TriBEKa consortium – a collaboration between three world leading academic and research centres for dementia prevention.
The TriBEKa (Tri Barcelona, Edinburgh and Karolinska) Imaging Platform builds upon large scale projects led by the University of Edinburgh’s Centre for Dementia Prevention in the UK, the Barcelonaβeta Brain Research Center in Spain and Sweden’s Karolinska Institute. The imaging platform will be closely linked with the flagship studies in each centre: PREVENT Dementia (Edinburgh) ALFA study (Barcelona) and FINGER (Karolinska).
The TriBEKa consortium is set up to understand the specific brain changes that take place during the middle age of an individual’s life course – we know that it is during the middle age where the earliest phases of neurodegenerative diseases start. The consortium is delighted to have received £1.9m from the US based Alzheimer’s Association and an anonymous international charitable foundation. TriBEKa will generate an open access neuroimaging platform that will use novel techniques to identify the very early preclinical changes and pre-amyloid deposition in the Alzheimer’s disease continuum and other neurodegenerative conditions.
The TriBEKa platform is designed to deliver the largest and best characterised data for understanding neurodegenerative disease and related clinical models in mid-life that is ever assembled globally. The project will include data from more than 1000 participants. The TriBEKa imaging platform will involve younger, middle aged participants, and therefore bring empirical data and knowledge to an earlier stage of the life course. The large scale projects TriBEKa is aligned with already collect vast amounts of data from people in their mid-life so the collaboration will enable a deeper analysis and discovery of risk factors in mid-life.
The consortium aims to offer the academic and drug development community evidence upon which to base drug development and other interventions. These drug developments will benefit from new insights, biomarker discovery, patient stratification and novel clinical and neuropsychological outcome measures. The participants are followed longitudinally to incorporate any changes in outcomes into the modeling of how neurodegenerative diseases develop starting in the earliest stages.
TriBEKa will therefore be a facilitator for evidence based interventions for dementia prevention, with the ultimate purpose of playing a significant part in the advancement of neuroscience to secure prevention of dementia by 2025.
The TriBEKa press release can be found here.
